I discussed community discontent with copyright terms of some scholarly publishers, and I proposed an economic analysis. Now let’s consider two other approaches. Contract hacking I have published quite a few scholarly papers, and with each one I am invited to sign a copyright form. This is a contract between author and publisher, which which […]
Modest Proposals for Academic Authors
April 17, 2012 by
In the scuffles over copyright policies on scholarly articles, what is the academic author to do? First, inform yourself. Find and read the copyright policy of the journals (or refereed conferences) to which you submit the articles describing research results. Find out the subscription price (dead-tree-edition or online) that the publisher charges individuals and institutions, […]
Copyright in Scholarly Publishing, 2012 Edition
April 16, 2012 by
I’ve heard a lot recently about copyright policies of scholarly journals. Over 9000 researchers signed a pledge to boycott Elsevier, on three grounds: (1) high prices for journal subscriptions, (2) bundling practices for institutional subscriptions; (3) lobbying regarding SOPA, PIPA, and the Research Works Act. Meanwhile, other organizations such as the ACM (scholarly/professional society for […]
Tech@FTC
March 27, 2012 by
Professor Ed Felten, while on loan to the Federal Trade Commission for 2011 and Spring 2012, has a new Tech Policy Blog, Tech@FTC. When he’s in his role as Chief Technologist of the FTC, he’ll blog there; when he’s wearing his regular hat as Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, he’ll blog here at freedom-to-tinker.
Of course, the big news from the FTC this week is the official report, Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change, and I see that Ed has something to say about that. But he’s also got an article about SQL injection and our friend, little Bobby Tables.
ACM opens another hole in the paywall
October 24, 2011 by
Last month I wrote about Princeton University’s new open-access policy. In fact, Princeton’s policy just recognizes where many disciplines and many scholarly publishers were going already. Most of the important publication venues in Computer Science already have an open-access policy–that is, their standard author copyright contract permits an author to make copies of his or her own paper available on the author’s personal web site or institutional repository. These publishers include the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Springer Verlag (for their LNCS series of conference proceedings), Cambridge University Press, MIT Press, and others.
For example, the ACM’s policy states,
Under the ACM copyright transfer agreement, the original copyright holder retains … the right to post author-prepared versions of the work covered by ACM copyright in a personal collection on their own Home Page and on a publicly accessible server of their employer, and in a repository legally mandated by the agency funding the research on which the Work is based. Such posting is limited to noncommercial access and personal use by others, and must include this notice both embedded within the full text file and in the accompanying citation display as well:
“© ACM, YYYY. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in PUBLICATION, {VOL#, ISS#, (DATE)} http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/nnnnnn.nnnnnn”
But now the ACM is trying something new; a mass mailing from ACM’s Director of Publications explains,
ACM has just launched a new referrer-linking service. It is called the ACM Author-Izer Service. In essence, ACM Author-Izer enables you to provide a free access to the definitive versions of your ACM articles permanently maintained by ACM in its Digital Library by embedding the links generated by this service in your personally maintained home-page bibliographies.
With widespread usage of this service, the need to post your author-prepared versions should be alleviated; automatic indexers will point to the article in the DL rather than alternative versions hosted elsewhere without the promise of being permanently maintained.
The ACM has not removed the author’s right to self-post copies of the articles, but clearly the publisher wants to discourage that, and to be the only source for content. Furthermore, authors can use this only if they buy in to the ACM’s “Author Profile” page, a feature that ACM has been pushing but that I suspect most authors don’t bother with. It’s an interesting strategy to capture links, or to reduce the number of copies floating around outside the control of the ACM archive. Whether it works may depend, in part, on how difficult it is for authors to use. I suspect most authors won’t bother, but if you want to see some Author-Ized links in action, click here and then click on “A Theory of Indirection via Approximation.” (I can’t link directly from this article, because the ACM permits this service from only one Web address.)
Unlike some newspapers, which are suffering badly in the Internet age, major nonprofit scholarly publishers such as the ACM are in good financial health, with a diverse array of activities and revenue sources: membership dues, conferences, refereed journals, magazines, paid job-advertisement web sites, and so on. Still, there is a lot of experimentation about how to survive as a publisher in the 21st century, and this appears to be the latest experiment.
