U.C. System and Springer Agree To CC-Licensed Journal Articles 54
NeoSkink writes "The University of California and Springer Science+Business Media have reached an agreement to provide open access for articles submitted by UC-affiliated authors. In a press release, the UC writes: 'Under the terms of the agreement, articles by UC-affiliated authors accepted for publication in a Springer journal beginning in 2009 will be published using Springer Open Choice with full and immediate open access. There will be no separate per-article charges, since costs have been factored into the overall license. Articles will be released under a license compatible with the Creative Commons (by-nc: Attribution, Non-commercial) license. In addition to access via the Springer platform, final published articles will also be deposited in the California Digital Library's eScholarship Repository.'"
change is a comin' (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:change is a comin' (Score:5, Insightful)
Otherwise a good chunk of papers produced by research done in the UC system will be submitted to Springer journals first.
If I write a paper, I'm going to try to get it in the best journal I can so it looks better on my resume. Open access does not factor into it. I'm not about to sell myself short and publish in a lower impact journal, and hurt my career, just to make sure everyone can access it free of charge.
That said, springer does have some high impact journals, and there could be other details I'm missing to sweeten the deal. All else being equal though, if faced with a choice between higher value publication and open access, it's not a question, and won't be for many other people.
Re:Non-Free license (Score:1, Insightful)
+5 Clueless ?
The license covers the written paper not the subject of the paper.
In the wording of the license, "the Work" refers to the paper, not to whatever the paper is discussing.
If applicable, the subject of the paper would be protected by patent.
rho
Re:Non-Free license (Score:3, Insightful)
IANAL, and I haven't read more than your post and a couple of others. But I interpret that "publicly perform" refers to "perform" in the theatrical sense. As in you can't go to a conference and present this paper in public. As for the concepts described in the paper, I don't see how anything other than patents can bind you not to use them once they're public.
Re:change is a comin' (Score:1, Insightful)
You don't have online access to your university's journal subscriptions from your university network?
-another PhD student
Academic Publishing is backwards and crooked (Score:3, Insightful)
Then, the journal sells your article to a company that sells access to universities. However, the scam is that, as academics, we are at least in part getting paid to do research. So the university is paying me to write papers and then it has to turn around and pay someone else to get access to that very same article! (Of course they are getting access to lots more articles than just those published by their own university)
Now, at least in the humanities, it is common to publish some articles and then turn those articles into a book. But wait, to get those articles published I had to give away my intellectual property rights. So if I want to make any use of that article, I have to get permission from the journal. Now, permission is generally given without any problem but call me crazy but I would rather not rely on someone's "generosity" in order to use my own work.
Finally, at least in the humanities, a lot of journals are ran by societies which are at least theoretically organized by academics themselves in order to advance the field that they are devoted to. So why is it that a society organized by us and for us is taking our intellectual property? When I raised this issue to the editor of one such journal he was shocked and refused to even entertain the notion of allowing us to keep our intellectual property because "that's how the journal makes money." This isn't to imply that academic publishers are sitting on piles of money or anything that kind of attitude doesn't really seem to have the right attitude to me.