In a move that is bound to put Felix among the _"Columbidae":http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/w/woodpigeon/index.asp _ the Journal of Cell Biology has come up with an interesting way of licensing its content.
Emma Hill and Mike Rossner take us on a journey that begins in 1787 and ends with the rather extraordinary statement (from a major scientific journal, at least) that they have now decided to return copyright to our authors, in return for the authors (that is, those of us who manage to publish in JCB) making the work available to the public.
In other words, article authors — scientists like you and me — grant JCB a licence to publish their work for six months.
There is a lot to think about in here, and I encourage you to read the entire statement . There is the thesis that six months is the monetary lifetime of a paper. There is the possibility that real data-mining will be made possible, a move that should make the likes of Peter Murray-Rust very happy (although the matter of format now becomes more pressing).
There is the intriguing thought that what appears to be a reclamation of the original premise of copyright might jump across to patents . Now that would be exciting, and good for science.
I should check, but I’m pretty sure a few journals do give copyright to the authors. I haven’t seen any insisting that the authors make them public after a period of time, but I like it.
Yup – any open access journal that follows the Bethesda Agreement, including all of BioMed Central’s journals. Too lazy to look up the reference, Richard – is it an exclusive or non-exclusive license? BMC doesn’t even take exclusivity, so the author can enjoy the copyright freedom straightaway.
But an interesting move for a traditional subscription journal, definitely.
The JCB (and other Univ of Rockefeller journals) are offering a creative commons licence. Not the most unfettered version, but all cc licences are relatively unfettered.
Many journals, including Nature Publishing Group ones, don’t ask authors for copyright but ask for an exclusive licence to publish. The author keeps copyright. However, this is different from the new Univ Rockefeller Press policy.
PS on Richard’s data mining point, journals differ on free-access. NPG journals, for example, make all the content freely available in a format with the letters OMPI but I may have written them in the wrong order. Peter M-R (mentioned above) isn’t happy about the NPG format details, as he says the data are all muddled up, but even so, all NPG content is freely available in this machine-readable form so those interested in data mining should be able to do it. There is discussion about this topic on Nascent, NPG’s web publishing department blog – key in the acronym (letters in right order, I suppose!) to the search and the latest news and updates are there; and one can comment, etc.
That’s interesting, Maxine (about the data format). It’s possibly not as important for a turncoat biologist like me, but I certainly understand where the hardcore chemists are coming from.
Jenny, it’s more complex than it first appears. The RUP takes an exclusive six months, but also:
And then there’s the Creative Commons blurb.
What’s intriguing me is the insistence that the authors license their work after the six months to the public:
- this seems to be unlimited, except that RUP must be attributed (and I haven’t found this bit in the legalese yet).
The cynic in me says this is a ‘scorched earth policy’: “If we can’t have your work for ever and ever, neither can anyone else” but it’s probably, on balance, a Good Thing.
This is an interesting approach and I need to have a closer look. I’ve not come across the ‘No Mirror’ clause before but the non-commercial bit is a problem. It makes all sorts of things very difficult but more to the point it sends the message that ‘Open Access can not make commercial sense’. Its by encouraging the commercial re-use of open access material that there is the opportunity to come up with new business models that might help to pay for it.
The no-mirror thing is interesting and I’ll need to check it out more seriously. ‘Any subset’ of the content would seem to include the paper itself? Are they trying to exclude re-use of the whole document.
One of the interesting questions that comes up with this kind of thing is the idea of re-publication. What happens if you take a low level open access journal and then select the most interesting papers out of that, perhaps re-edit, and then re-publish under a new journal banner. Both might appear e.g. in pubmed which would raise some interesting issues. Perhaps this is what they are trying to block here? But JCB is a pretty high profile journal isn’t it?
The commercial argument requires more cognition cycles than I can spare at the moment.
JCB is very high profile (heh. Third hit. Heh) . One of the best to be seen in for Cell Biologists.
Ah, ok the no mirror provision only applies to the first six months. I can see the argument for that. Its a neat way of getting the exclusivity for the journal without necessarily reducing the rights of the author. Not sure how that would stand up in court or how they’ve executed the legal terms of the license to enable that.
“A “mirror site” is a web site that contains the same content as a parent web site but is located at a different geographic location from the parent site.”
so if you can figure out where their servers are that’s alright then? They’ve tacked this on the end of the standard language of CC-NC-BY and it is rather vaguely worded. Does a website have a physical location?
One thing that strikes me about ‘returning copyright’ to the authors is that it doesn’t deal with the elements of the copyright that belong to the journal e.g. typesetting, editorial modifications. Anyone in the Nature offices know if this has ever become a problem or are all such rights explicitly passed to the author? Or am I just worrying too much again :)
Cameron, NPG has an exclusive licence and the authors copyright. The author can archive her/his “accepted” (non-subedited) version in a repository after six months, but the typeset, edited version remains on nature.com, for the published record.
I am not aware that Nature (the journal) has had any complaints from published authors about this policy, which has been our policy since about 2002 — and I do receive a great number of intemperate comments from authors, would-be authors, and indeed all and sundry. (Often, these are not about anything to do with the editorial process of publication, but are about quite different matters. I could go on but I had better not.)
Oh, go on, Maxine. You can’t drop that tantalizing hint and not tell a few tales, names changed to protect the innocent et al.
Tell you what Maxine, email me privately and I’ll write it all up in my novel.
xx
Maxine, so would I be right in saying that NPG therefore retains any copyright that originated with it? And the authors retain all copyright that originated with them?
AArgh! I just lost all my response through pressing “preview” to check the spelling.
So, briefly, I am afraid it is nothing juicy, Richard and Jennifer. It is more my sense of loyalty to my employer that prevents me from saying what — but essentially, complaints about subscriptions, our search engine, the website stability, all kinds of things.
Cameron: I don’t fully follow your question as written. If you are an author of an original research paper, you retain copyright and we have exclusive licence to publish. If you are commissioned by us to write, say, a book review, we retain copyright (and pay you a small fee). If you submit an article for publication that has copyrighted material in it (not the case for primary research papers as all that has to be original, but can happen eg in a review article, where you might be reproducing figures from other (non NPG) journals, you are responsible for obtaining relevant permission.
That’s about the extent of my knowledge of the policy, but take a look at the policy page
David Hoole, who sets the policy on behalf of NPG, would be happy to answer any further questions I’m sure (his email is the usual nature email system, d.hoole@….).