Slashdot Log In
Copyright Advocacy Group Violates Copyright
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Aug 27, 2007 06:41 PM
from the how-to-thoroughly-discredit-yourself dept.
from the how-to-thoroughly-discredit-yourself dept.
word munger writes "Commercial scholarly publishers are beginning to get afraid of the open access movement. They've hired a high-priced consultant to help them sway public opinion in favor of copyright restrictions on taxpayer-funded research. Funny thing is, their own website contains several copyright violations. It seems they pulled their images directly from the Getty Images website — watermarks and all — without paying for their use."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
0wned (Score:3, Funny)
didn't we already pay? (Score:5, Insightful)
"They want to restrict access to publicly-funded research results by requiring that everyone pay a fee to see it."
If the research is funded by the public, didn't we already pay to see it?
Re:didn't we already pay? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:didn't we already pay? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not even hard to do so. A lot the publicly funded research builds on non-publicly funded work that has previously been done at the same place or that is being done in parallel with the publicly funded stuff in that very same place. It's not like you can always carve out a complete research item and work on it independently of prior knowledge or of any additional non-public funding.
I've worked in research for many years, and we always had a combination of public and private/corporate funding ongoing for just about anything we did. In fact, doing so was a necessity, as there was no way we could have built and sustained the critical mass needed to be able to even qualify for most public funding if we had been using only public money. In fact, on most programs we got a maximum of 50% public funds. We had to put part of our results in the open in return by publishing, or by providing free licenses to certain parties (who needn't always be a member of the research program). But our work always included material and IP that was privately funded as well. Because of all this, we actually developed a model in which we even gave access to some of the privately funded bits developed with money from company X to company Y (and vice versa) or even to "the public". But it goes without saying that no company X or Y would have funded us if we'd have applied that model to everything we did, just because someone in our lab who was "working on the same big picture" had a public fellowship or was working within the scope of a governmental project.
Parent
Re:didn't we already pay? (Score:5, Insightful)
End of story. Spare me the "but some was private and some was...", blah, blah, blah, crap. Your company held out its greedy little hands to take OUR tax dollars. Any knowledge gained from public money must be given back to the public. Period. No jumping through hoops or other fancy legal crap to keep from returning the publics ROI. We want our dollars back with interest or with gained public knowledge.
Parent
Re:didn't we already pay? (Score:5, Interesting)
My (previous) employer is a non-profit organisation, created by and partially funded by the local government. They get more than just public results out of the place, they also get jobs (1500 at the place where I worked and a lot more in companies created and/or attracted by us). Not to mention millions of foreign high-tech investment from all the big names in our industry, which is good for the economy. Not to mention also the fact that we publish over 1000 research papers each year, so you can earn your dollars using results that our government and partners paid Euro's for. I.e.: it wasn't even your tax money in the first place!
And since we were non-profit...
Parent
Re:didn't we already pay? (Score:5, Insightful)
The public should be outraged that their money is used to fund research that is then restricted from them. The corporate sponsors should also be outraged, for they too have to pay the publishers for access to research which they already funded!
Why should the researchers agree to surrender control of the information to a publisher, who uses it to turn a profit, rather than distribute the information openly? The open distribution suits the needs of the academics much better: it is better for science because the information is freely available to be analyzed, improved, and built upon. It is also better from a career standpoint, because free dissemination increases one's citations and reputation.*
The fact that science receives a mixture of corporate and public funding changes nothing. In the current system, *everyone* has to pay for access to information. Even the people who funded the work or did the work have to pay for access, whether they are a university, a corporation, or the public. Something is very wrong with that antiquated system.
(*Note: Open access is better for the career of an academic if all other things are equal. The main roadblock to open-access is that scientists feel pressure to publish in "high impact" journals, which are the older, more established journals. Thus at present there is a conflict between the desire to publish openly, and the desire to publish in high-repute journals. Luckily the landscape is changing, with more journals moving towards open policies, and newer open access journals gaining reputation quickly.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
In many labs (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. The guy with the 3 letters was the one who was paid. Here's how it works: some public body says: "OK, we'll fund you to to this work under these and these conditions. You'll get 3 person-years of funding spread out over 1.5 years." The lab internally then says: "Well, who are our most expensive people that we can allocate to this project, if need be only for 10% of their time?" Provided that these prople are not yet funded elsewhere and can credibly be claimed to work on the project, be it for doing t
Re:didn't we already pay? (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, but you didn't pay for the results. Results costs extra. Good results cost even more.
Parent
Re:didn't we already pay? (Score:5, Funny)
But dumb looks are still free.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:didn't we already pay? (Score:5, Informative)
Happily, I haven't had a problem inserting "release code as open source" as a bullet in all my grant proposals. Since the grant proposal is a contract of sorts, I can point to the proposal (that the institution signed off on) if any lawyer starts hassling me about disclosing patentable discoveries.
Note to all you folks in grad school: put everything you can, including printouts of your code, as appendices in your thesis. Your thesis is copyright you, so the institution can't keep your work (in the thesis) as their own.
Parent
Re:You didn't pay for peer review (Score:5, Informative)
The journal subscription fees, which fund the editorial staff and so forth, are paid by libraries at universities and government labs (which, again, receive money from university funds and/or government grants). So, again, a good fraction of the costs are being covered by public funds. The scientific journals could not continue operating without the money coming from public sources, so the question remains: why does the public have to pay to read material that they have already funded in other ways? You misunderstand the intentions of the open-access movement. Scientists are not asking for peer review to be eliminated. Quite the opposite: having the information more open can only enhance the amount of open criticism and discussion of science. The intention is to have journals continue to rely on volunteer reviewers, and to cover journal editorial costs using publication fees instead of subscription fees. So, instead of the public paying to read the final article, the authors would pay a charge when they are publishing, and the results become freely available.
In the end, this changes very little from the financial perspective of the scientific institutes. If journals switched to open access, then institutes would pay publication charges instead of subscription charges. The net effect would be the same for them. The upshot is that the public, and smaller research labs, have better access to scientific knowledge. In no case is peer review removed from the process.
In fact, take note that many high-impact open-access journals are starting to appear (most notably the publications of the Public Library of Science [plos.org]). These new journals are maintaining the rigor of the peer-reviewed scientific process.
In the end, the Journals and publishers still make money under an open access paradigm. So why do they resist it? The usual reasons: they fear change, they fear competition, and they may make less money than they are currently used to. But science will continue.
Parent
Go for it! (Score:2)
The only silver lining...... (Score:2)
Godwin's Law (Score:2)
The only way you could defend this hypocrisy is to poorly argue against it, and invoke Godwin's Law.
Like Billy Joel said... (Score:4, Funny)
ah yes now I remember (Score:2)
Springer Slutz (Score:2)
Like taking someone out on a first date, only to have them hump another diner in the toilet who slips them US$40. Is that Ivy League?
Obligatory. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Ummm, if text in the hair means "copyright", who is this "sex" who has the copyright on my Farah Fawcett poster?
The difference is... (Score:2)
I know I don't have proof to back either of these statements, but I suspect they ring true to those of us willing to be honest about our motivations.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Surprised? (Score:5, Informative)
I notice a lot of comments pointing out, reasonably, that since we the taxpayers have already payed for research, we should not be expected to pay for it again to the benefit of a few businessmen with a special interest.
The concept makes sense...to most of us, at any rate.
The U.S. Government, however, disagrees. [wikipedia.org]
Soap, ballot, jury, ammo.
Let's give them a shout! (Score:3, Interesting)
web designer (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to defend their movement or anything, but assuming the site wasnt made in-house by an "IP believer", the situation is ironic, not hypocritical.
Re:web designer (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:web designer (Score:5, Insightful)
In general, that's how organizations respond when they decide they shouldn't be doing something: they tell their people not to do it, and sanction them if they don't listen.
So Prism is going around telling other organizations to implement a policy while failing to implement it themselves. Sounds like hypocrisy to me.
Parent
A clumsy attempt to rouse public opinion (Score:5, Informative)
I admire the chutzpa of the complaint about "undue government intervention". Research federally funded, peer-review carried out by publicly funded academics, but commercial publishers would first copyright articles sent to them for free, and them charge federal government for those same articles? Measures to ensure that the feds can download and copy those articles for free is "interfering"? Oh boy!
How about some proper negotiation with those publishers about copyrights? How about setting up all-electronic Open Source journals that offer access free of charge, and let commercial publishers compete with the Open Source journals for articles they want to publish? Or is that "compromising the viability" of the commercial offerings?
Yes ... on the subject of "compromising the viability". Joe Sixpack might not recognise this statement for the fallacy it is. Research is carried out (often funded by federal government), and written of for free by the researchers who did it. Peer review of scientific articles is carried out for free by scientists in their field. Those are the "peers" that conduct peer-review. And they are *not* funded by the publishers, the are funded by their respective employers (universities, companies), and by the individual researchers themselves, who will often spend their own time reviewing papers..
Now it's widely known that todays science publishing is big business (commercial science publishers post excellent earnings every year) and scientific journals are terribly expensive (just ask any university library near you).
The fun part is that commercial publishers really do very little for the journals they publish. Just consider:
- the raw material is delivered to them in the electronic format of their choice, free of charge
- they must then employ a qualified editor who does the first crude selection. (This individual will have to be paid be paid a good salary, say $60k - $80k a year.)
- then they send the articles to individual researchers for peer-review. This takes a few hours of secretarial support, a rolodex, and an email account.
- then they read the comments from the peer reviewers that help them decide whether the article is publishable, and they route the comments to the authors for improvement and response
- finally they receive the amended article, in electronic form, do a final check, and have it typeset.
That's all. The little secret is that commercial publishers don't really add that much of value. But a library subscription can easily come to $8,000 - $12,000 per year. How many of them would you need to cover your costs? Publishers don't let on obviously, but a fair guess is that $200,000 annually will be enough to keep a journal running. That would be, say 40 subscriptions of $5
Re: (Score:2)
photographs and images never have republishing rights as fair use. If you grab anything from a clip art collections or someone else's collected works it needs the appropriate license. Photographers and graphics artists can't make money on support thus require licensing fees to get paid for their work. They take it really seriously because i
Re:A clumsy attempt to rouse public opinion (Score:4, Informative)
> Research federally funded, peer-review carried out by publicly funded academics,
> but commercial publishers would first copyright articles sent to them for free,
FREE? But it is not free! The scientists PAY money to the publisher for an article to be published! It is by no means free. Certain journals make you pay a couple of thousand dollars for publication, plus extra for images plus a lot more extra for colour images. Mind you, as the author of the article you can usually download the PDF form of the article (i.e. the same file you sent them + journal name and page number on the bottom) for free. Forget about a free copy of the journal itself, that's a very much outdated concept - buy the paper, if you want it, like everybody else. You are not the copyright holder, after all.
For what it's worth, some scientific journals put a disclaimer in a footnote on the first page of each article. The footnote states that since the athors of the article paid for the publication of their results, in the legal sense the whole article should be considered as paid advertisement. No kidding.
Parent
I know of no journal you have to pay to publish (Score:2)
It might be that it differs by field and by journal (I'm in engineering / maths), and I'm sure that e.g. Nature doesn't demand fees to publish.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Scholarly publishing is a moneymaking scam anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
In order to get your article published you have to subscribe to the journal and in most cases the society that the produces the journal. When you get published you don't get paid and the publishers take the copyright. Because they take the copyright when you want to revise the paper, turn it into a book, or even pass it out to use in your own class you have to get permission. Now they always give permission but they are under no legal obligation to do so. They own the article outright.
Then the journals turn around and sell access to their articles to a database company like ebsco or someone else. That database company then charges universities for access to those articles.
As academics part of what we get paid for is to publish. So the university pays us to publish and then turns around and has pay someone else to get access to those very same articles that they paid to have written in the first place. Sure they get access to lots of other articles written by people from other universities but the fact is they are paying twice for these articles. I'm sure there are lots of other businesses that wish they had the same business model.
To top it off, as I said earlier, a lot of these journals are the official publications of academic societies. These societies are organized by academics in the field for academics in that field. It is supposed to help with the advancement and promotion of that area of study. So why are they taking the copyrights of their members? Sadly, most academics don't know or care about intellectual property and so the few times I've asked that very question I've been met with "I don't know" or the editor of the journal trying to defend profiting off our backs.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How Do You Know??!! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
1. You can look at the images with the watermark on them and choose if you want to buy them.
2. When you buy them you get the images without the watermark and the right to distribute them.
Therefore, if you choose to use the image with the watermark, even though you've paid to use them, then you're an idiot.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
getty doesn't watermark the images that are bought. i'd guess they don't even have high-rez files with watermarks. so you're suggesting that someone paid getty for the rights to an image and rather than download the high-rez non-watermarked file they chose to use the watermarked low-rez preview file? that's completely ridiculous and utter nonsense. nobody would
Re:How Do You Know??!! (Score:5, Informative)
Hell, if they just wanted a legit cheap picture, they'd have gone to iStockPhoto.
Parent
Re:How Do You Know??!! (Score:5, Interesting)
if getty images wanted to support this cause, i'm sure the designer or the organization could have negotiated out a pro-bono deal with them easily. getty commonly supplies non-watermarked high-rez images for their regular customers if you ask. i've downloaded high-rez images from them and even stock footage for project presentations. no designer in their right mind would use a watermarked image like that.
Parent
Re:Submitter didn't do their homework (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Submitter didn't do their homework (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
its curious though, there are actual people in the world, who PAY for some research through their taxes, and then does not want the ownership of it through public domain.
totally contradicts capitalism. you paid for it, but you dont own it.
Re:Taxpayer research is public domain (Score:5, Informative)
I've read quite a number of histories of science in which the authors point out that the Western "scientific revolution" during the last few centuries has nothing to do with discovering "the scientific method". Scientific methods have been independently discovered in nearly all societies, going back into prehistory. One example I ran across recently was the comment that from what we know of their methods, the North American Indians' "medicine men" had better medicine than Europe did until sometime in the 1800s. The reason was that the medicine men actually had better scientific methodology than European doctors did. But then things changed
So what caused the big advances in Western science in the past few centuries? The historians answer to this is simple: open publication. In all other societies, such knowledge has almost always been strictly controlled by small "guilds". The knowledge was secret, and discoveries were usually not even shared with colleagues outside the discoverer's immediate circle of professionals. This meant that everything had to be rediscovered over and over again. You could only learn what your mentors knew, and you could only build on what they passed on to you, because everyone else's knowledge was unavailable to you.
But a few hundred years ago, some researchers in Europe developed a curious new approach: They published their discoveries openly, making them available for others to read, use, and build on. This led to the explosive growth of knowledge that we're familiar with.
In most of the West, such open publication is historically done only by government researchers. Before the 20th century, this meant the few idle rich such as Isaac Newton, who had brains and curiosity. So it took a while to really get going. But in the 1900s, various governments slowly got it through their thick skulls that funding research was one of the things that was building other countries' economies (and militaries), so maybe they should be funding research too. Then things really started ramping up.
But there is still one major drag on scientific advance: A lot of funding still goes into "private" (i.e., corporate) research. This is, scientifically speaking, usually a dead end, because the results of such research is kept private, and as of with the guilds of old, it isn't available for others to build on. The legal system cooperates in this, by prosecuting people who get access to private research results and try to build on it. In recent years, this has been happening more and more in the US, as the corporate world consolidates its control over the government and determines how most research is funded. Some universities also contribute to the problem, by claiming ownership of research results when they can and keeping it secret (or usable only under high license fees). I've read a few predictions that useful American research may be ending now, as the corporate world takes most of it private. And it's curious to see the publishers of scientific journals jumping in to block the advent of cheap open publication via the Internet.
Anyway, at least according to these histories, we should be supporting the open-publication people, because they're the ones pushing for more of what really made Western science the success it has been. If we really want Science to continue to improve our lives, we should be pushing for full access to all research results.
(And people have pointed out that the Internet is an example of the same phenomenon. It hasn't succeeded because it's such a great network. The IP/UDP/TCP/DNS/SMTP/HTTP/... protocols aren't all that good, actually. They're good enough to do the job, but anyone who knows them can tell you lots of ways to improve them. The reason for the Internet's success is mostly that all the specs have been published openly from the start. Anyone can download them for free, read them and implement them without legal restrictions. This gave the Internet a huge advantage over other privately-developed protocols that were often technically better but weren't available to any developer that was curious.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No; it didn't have a single cause. Gutenberg certainly made a major contribution and helped to enable the Enlightenment. But his technical advance potentially made publication easier and cheaper for everyone in the world, not just in Europe. The really important advance wasn't in the hardware, but rather in the "software", i.e., in the social structure that developed the concept of open publication of scientific results. This could have been done anyw
Honor among thieves? (Score:3, Insightful)