Did you hear this? In light of all the recent debates and discussions about publishing and open access, check out this news:
Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted.
The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication.
Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions, which can cost up to $25,000 a year for some journals or hundreds of dollars for a single issue, are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. Individual articles are also commonly locked behind pay walls.
Read the rest, here. More about this soon, but I just wanted to post this and see what others think about these developments. Check out some of the discussion in the comments section as well. Very, very interesting…
*Hat tip to Justin Shaffner for sending this my way. Thanks!
Delighted.
While open access is a great concept, the achievement of open access can be a complicated battle, and the new Princeton policy opens a number of potholes in its effort to smooth the road to access. Mixing metaphors seems appropriate in this case.
Citing subscription rates of $25,000 is simply a scare tactic, and can backfire. It reduces the virtues of open access to issues of mere economic convenience: it costs too much, therefore I should get it free. Well…. maybe not.
Allusion to “taxpayer funded research” is a red herring. Some research is government funded, of course, but sorting out which dollars came from taxes and which came from other revenues, including sale of bonds, tariffs, etc., is an impossible and crazy exercise. And what about the vast amount of scholarship that is not even government funded, let alone taxpayer funded? Can there be a claim to a moral right to open access to an article written by someone who received no government support whatsoever? Maybe not.
One concern I have about the Princeton policy is that it turns an academic job into a kind of Goffmanesque total institution. It proposes that any “scholarly” publication that I produce can be controlled, at least for purposes of copyright and access, by Princeton University. It does not discuss the many exceptions that are commonplace, including the consulting work that we do for ‘outside’ agencies, and which we may chose to publish; in such cases I would contest the right of my university to exercise any control whatsoever over such scholarly work, especially if I do not identify myself as an employee of that university in any publications I produce from private consulting. Princeton does not seem to recognize that being a Princeton University employee is not totalizing.
Finally, I think that Princeton is opening up a potential problem when it tries to distinguish different kinds of writing/publishing and exempts some of those kinds from the policy. I have no doubt that the committee was acutely aware that with an author such as Joyce Carol Oates on the faculty (Toni Morrison retired in 2006, so is presumably exempt completely) they had better exempt novels and other fiction from their policy, even though JCO’s writing is part of what she is paid for in the same way as members of the anthropology or physics faculty are paid to write the “scholarly” articles they produce. Princeton might look at the problem of faculty patents in many universities, where the old policies are not working very well any more. New patent policies and access rules will probably have to meet somewhere in the middle.
Mixing metaphors does seem appropriate in this case, and a skim of the unusually readable report by the Ad-hoc Faculty Committee to study Open Access (Carol Greenhouse’s presence on the committee suggests that some thought was put into its composition) linked via the blog post would suggest that Princeton is not setting up death panels to take away its faculty members’ guns.
From page 2 of the report: “[E]ach Faculty member hereby grants to The Trustees of Princeton University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium […] The University hereby authorizes each member of the faculty to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles that are subject to the terms and conditions of the grant set forth above. This authorization is irrevocable, non-assignable, and may be amended by written agreement in the interest of further protecting and promoting the spirit of open access.”
Horses for courses. See page 4 of the report, which ultimately makes reference to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (boai). To wit:
boai makes an explicit and fundamental distinction between writings that scientists and scholars do and do not wish to give away for free. boai applies only to the former. The objective is that when authors do wish to give away their writings, then readers should not have to pay access tolls to read them. There should be open access to such writings and only to such writings. The boai sees no need to estimate how many authors are in this category, and does not endorse attempts to provide open access to any work without its author’s consent.
Authors of textbooks typically hope to make money from them. Therefore this initiative does not apply to textbooks. Most authors of scholarly monographs hope to make money from them, regardless of the true sales prospects. Therefore this initiative does not apply to most scholarly monographs. But by contrast, most authors of peer-reviewed journal articles do not expect payment for them and willingly publish them in journals that pay no royalties or fees. Such articles form the core of the literature to which this initiative applies.
Why? While patents and copyrights are both ipr concerns, their whys and hows are distinct.
MT: Thanks for your comments. My concerns were driven partly by my experience as a lawyer dealing with very similar issues in a variety of academic settings. For example, courts have routinely found that policies that require you to take extra steps to retain rights that you should not have had to give up to begin with are not supportable. Princeton’s policies set up a mechanism for exemption, but you should not have to undertake additional work to be exempt. This could become a legal issue in the future.
I may not have made the point about fiction clearly enough. Writing has traditionally been exempt from university control, whether it’s the fiction that Joyce Carol Oates publishes or the “scholarly” articles that you and I publish. Princeton needs a stronger justification for isolating a class of publications to subject to its new policies. The university may need to show, for example, that traditional forms of publishing so severely limit access to scholarly publications that imposing a requirement of open access is justified. I have doubts that this will be possible, and I think those doubts are reasonable. This is a potential problem that Princeton could head off with better formulation of its policy.
With regard to Boai, it is already the case that anyone can negotiate an open-access or open-access like arrangement with a journal or publisher. Nothing in the Princeton policy speaks to that. Rather, the Princeton policy adopts the default position that you must/should give away your work, and imposes an additional burden if you do not wish to do so. Again, I think this is slippery, from a legal point of view.
The issue with patents is more complex, so allow me to say, as you already know, that universities have traditionally required that faculty turn over patents to their university; this is, in effect, the opposite of the treatment of scholarly publications. The Princeton policy, and similar policies in other universities (e.g. MIT), nudges them closer to the patent policy, specifically the assumption that the university has the right to enact any kind of policy AT ALL regarding scholarly publications, contrary to long-standing tradition. At the same time, and certainly since Gatorade and the University of Florida, faculty have been exploring creative ways to side-step the patent issue. For example, faculty working in biotech fields have simply resigned from their university positions, joined private biotech companies, and patented their work outside of university control. Universities have been responding to this possibility by creating flexibility in their patent policies, allowing ‘partnerships,’ university/industry collaborations, profit-sharing, etc., to retain productive and, well, inventive faculty. Again, two historically opposite ways of treating IPR issues, probably driven by profit interests, but which may start to look more alike as the traditionally tight controls on patents get loosened, and traditionally loose controls on scholarly publication get tightened.
Don’t misread my intentions. I am a supporter of both open access and facilitated access policies. I would prefer to see them developed in a way that sails around the legal shoals on which other have crashed. (I just wanted to work in another metaphor…)
I’m glad to see an actual debate about this policy emerging here in the comments. I support open access, and I give away most of what I write willingly for free. But I will not acquiesce in a policy that would give my employer a license to republish any of my scholarly work without recompense.
I have read the documentation in this case, and I understand that the intent of the Princeton faculty is to empower academic staff to publish while retaining copyright. But this is a fundamentally misguided strategy for achieving open access ends. It essentially prevents faculty from licensing their copyright freely by reducing their copyright to a form of work-for-hire.
One may argue that the policy as currently written protects future faculty rights to publish. But as written, the policy depends entirely on administrative definitions of “scholarly” and “article”. It relies on traditional understandings of form, just at a time when technology is enabling radical transformations of the form of scholarly writing.
I am also deeply worried about textbooks. Materials developed during the course of teaching a class are much more arguably subject a work-for-hire standard than scholarly articles. Why shouldn’t MIT require that its professors who write textbooks leave an exclusive license with the university to make those available free of charge on OpenCourseWare? We are protected from this outcome only by standards and policies that support academic freedom. If that protection is eroded for scholarly publishing, surely there is much more of an argument in favor of course materials being made subject to the same.
Is there then case law establishing the traditional expectation of copyright transfer to the journal publisher as not supportable?
“Is there then case law establishing the traditional expectation of copyright transfer to the journal publisher as not supportable?”
No – that’s not an analogous situation. The situation you describe is no different in kind from selling or leasing a copyright, which is common practice in publishing, writing for hire, etc. In these cases you are free to give up your copyright, sell it, transfer it, etc. That’s different from having to take a special action to retain it, when it’s yours to begin with.
A closer situation is the case of the former rule that an author had to establish copyright by registering the work with the feds. That was found to be an unreasonable burden, and while it’s sometimes useful, it is no longer necessary. Again, you should not have to undertake special measures to retain a right you already have.
So authors are as free as anyone else to alienate their labor. Princeton demands that their faculty members publish in scholarly journals if they are to keep their jobs and is thus party to creating a situation in which publishers are able to say, “Alienate your labor or find a new line of work.” The intended consequence of the policy would seem to be the creation of a de facto trust relationship between Princeton and its faculty members in regards to copyright. Since I am completely sympathetic to the argument that Americans are most dangerous when wearing their do-gooder hats, I do understand the need to guard against unintended consequences. General anxiety about institutional overreach as cause for not undertaking a policy change like this one is a little too Ron Paul for my tastes, though. But that’s just me…
Whether the policy would withstand legal challenge is another issue. I suppose my feeling is that it is good that Princeton is at least trying to do something. But see above regarding do-gooderism.
I still need to digest the specific documents. For now, I just want to note that Princeton is hardly in the lead with the establishment of faculty imposed green OA mandates. Those interested in the current score on the establishment of institutional mandate policies can consult the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (aka ROARMAP), a database freely accessible online. It notes 132 institutional mandates as well as a number of other kinds of known mandates (funder, departmental, dissertation, etc.).
No – that’s not an analogous situation. The situation you describe is no different in kind from selling or leasing a copyright, which is common practice in publishing, writing for hire, etc. In these cases you are free to give up your copyright, sell it, transfer it, etc. That’s different from having to take a special action to retain it, when it’s yours to begin with.
I can’t really follow your argument; perhaps you could elaborate a bit more. Princeton is demanding a non-exclusive license; that’s all. “If you want to work here, we get a license to distribute your journal articles, though you remain free to grant other licenses to other parties (like journals) as you wish.” The only right the author loses is the right to grant exclusive licenses. You think this would be overturned as a contract against the public policy expressed in the copyright act?
x: Since I’m part of a group that may end up litigating a case that has some similarities to the Princeton policy, I’ll pass on being too explicit about our strategies, with apologies and requests for indulgence.
Nonetheless, there are interesting issues in the open access movement that are touched upon in the Princeton memo that might be worth discussing in a forum such as this. I suggested in a couple of quick asides that demands for open access to materials traditionally available only through subscription or in libraries regularly cite two issues, and the Princeton memo mentions others. All of these are contestable, interesting, and worth considering.
For example, the commonly raised issue of cost strikes me as weak. Journal subscriptions have been just-out-of-reach for graduate students and many faculty for generations. In the past students and faculty relied on academic libraries to subscribe to major scholarly journals, circumventing the problem with a combination of the local library and inter-library loans. Now, libraries frequently buy large packages of online subscriptions. Rather than narrowing access, such packages massively expand access. My own university library is fairly typical, and through it I have access to journals in my fields that I had never even heard of before, in addition to the all of the major journals, some of which we did not get 20 years ago.
If access has improved and expanding through such means, what’s the problem? Costs are an issue, but to institutions, not to me personally — I’ve never been able to subscribe to more than a few major journals.
I’m just speculating here, but I wonder if part of the current demand for open access is a product of internet culture. With so much information so quickly available at no cost to anyone – not just students and faculty – the notion that some information is not accessible because it is behind subscription walls or requires an academic affiliation seems to be offensive, even to people who have such access. Universal free access, not merely university free access, seems to be the goal, at least implicitly. Worthy or not, it’s a goal that runs so counter to the political economy of scholarship for so long that I think we need to be pretty explicit and reflexive about what we want and why.
The Princeton memo, for example, mentions the value or importance of our scholarship being available to a wider public than those who could afford subscriptions. Our scholarship always has been available to a wider public than those who could afford subscriptions, so I take the Princeton policy to refer to people outside of traditional academic and other scholarly settings. It is not at all obvious why that is the best of all possible worlds. In cases such as global climate change, wide public access to scholarly research seems to have generated more confusion and contention than clarity, in part because lay people, including journalists, simply don’t know how to evaluate complicated research.
Anyway, there are lots of interesting issues in this area, and I hope they can get additional scrutiny – I know that Savage Minds and its authors have been supporters of open access, and a serious consideration of why would be helpful.
LIKE ITS HARVARD MODEL, PRINCETON’S OPEN ACCESS POLICY NEEDS TO ADD AN IMMEDIATE-DEPOSIT REQUIREMENT, WITH NO WAIVER OPTION
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/844-guid.html
1. First, congratulations to Princeton University (my graduate alma mater!) for adopting an open access mandate: a copyright-reservation policy, adopted by unanimous faculty vote.
2. Princeton is following in the footsteps of Harvard in adopting the copyright-reservation policy pioneered by Stuart Shieber and Peter Suber.
4. I hope that Princeton will now also follow in the footsteps of Harvard by adding an immediate-deposit requirement with no waiver option to its copyright-reservation mandate, as Harvard has done.
5. The Princeton copyright-reservation policy, like the Harvard copyright-reservation policy, can be waived if the author wishes: This is to allow authors to retain the freedom to choose where to publish, even if the journal does not agree to the copyright-reservation.
6. Adding an immediate-deposit clause, with no opt-out waiver option, retains all the properties and benefits of the copyright-reservation policy while ensuring that all articles are nevertheless deposited in the institutional repository upon publication, with no exceptions: Access to the deposited article can be embargoed, but deposit itself cannot; access is a copyright matter, deposit is not.
7. Depositing all articles upon publication, without exception, is crucial to reaching 100% open access with certainty, and as soon as possible; hence it is the right example to set for the many other universities worldwide that are now contemplating emulating Harvard and Princeton by adopting open access policies of their own; copyright reservation alone, with opt-out, is not.
8. The reason it is imperative that the deposit clause must be immediate and without a waiver option is that, without that, both when and whether articles are deposited at all is indeterminate: With the added deposit requirement the policy is a mandate; without it, it is just a gentleman/scholar’s agreement.
[Footnote: Princeton’s open access policy is also unusual in having been adopted before Princeton has created an open access repository for its authors to deposit in: It might be a good idea to create the repository as soon as possible so Princeton authors can get into the habit of practising what they pledge from the outset…]
Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship
First of all, I am really glad to see some debate and discussion about this. While I think that these recent developments at Princeton are intriguing, I am not sure what I think specifically about the way they are going about this. Is this the best way to go about OA? I need to read more about the details of what’s going on here.
@Barbara Piper:
“For example, the commonly raised issue of cost strikes me as weak. Journal subscriptions have been just-out-of-reach for graduate students and many faculty for generations.”
Is cost really a non-issue? Don’t some of the high costs of these journals cut into library budgets that could be used in some other ways? Also, just because these pubs have been out of reach for generations doesn’t mean that the current system makes any sense (or that it’s the best way to organize and distribute the information academics produce). Maybe these pubs shouldn’t be so out of reach?
“If access has improved and expanding through such means, what’s the problem? Costs are an issue, but to institutions, not to me personally — I’ve never been able to subscribe to more than a few major journals.”
Well, access is no problem as long as you’re at a university…and as long as your university happens to have a subscription to a particular journal. But what about folks who are not inside the university system? Should this information only be available to people who are entrenched in certain networks and institutions?
“Universal free access, not merely university free access, seems to be the goal, at least implicitly. Worthy or not, it’s a goal that runs so counter to the political economy of scholarship for so long that I think we need to be pretty explicit and reflexive about what we want and why.”
I definitely agree with you that the overall goals of this need to be made more explicit–what ARE people trying to achieve with OA? In my view, it’s about expanding access but it’s also about authors gaining more control over the access to and distribution of their own work. The current system, in which authors get paid nothing and then told what they can and can’t do with their own work, well, that doesn’t make much sense to me. But I am a grad student on the outside looking in with all this, and I have a lot to learn. What I am NOT going to do, however, is just jump headlong into the current system, especially considering all of the problems.
“In cases such as global climate change, wide public access to scholarly research seems to have generated more confusion and contention than clarity, in part because lay people, including journalists, simply don’t know how to evaluate complicated research.”
I am not sure if I buy the argument that all of this confusion comes down to lay people and journalists not knowing how to evaluate scholarly research. Putting all of the blame on the inability of the public to understand academic work doesn’t sit all that well with me. How much of this is a factor of poor communication on the part of academics? Do we have to rethink how, why, and in what form we communicate our ideas? Is it possible that we have to find ways to communicate complex information clearly and effectively. I have to admit that I find some of the environmental and biological science pretty rough to read through–it’s like reading another dialect or something. And anthropology is just as guilty of producing media that is, for all intents and purposes, unreadable to audiences outside of certain social spheres. I am not convinced that this has to be the case. I think there are indeed ways to communicate ideas effectively to different audiences…but that will take some work, of course. Overall, I think we have to look at both sides of the issue when it comes to communicating and evaluating scholarly research. The problem isn’t just on one side of the equation, IMO.
“Anyway, there are lots of interesting issues in this area, and I hope they can get additional scrutiny – I know that Savage Minds and its authors have been supporters of open access, and a serious consideration of why would be helpful.”
I completely agree. Thanks for your comments and thoughts, Barbara. I am hoping that we can all keep these conversations and debates doing, since I think they do matter.