This is a reply to a post over at Plausible Accuracy, asking some questions about my talk at MIT (online here) from last fall…
The author is a scientist and asks a good question about one of the points I make in the talk, regarding the relationship between copyright and creative works and scholarly publishing. It’s a point I have actually removed from my talks recently because I was finding it misconstrued – it’s a little subtle and hard to grok sometimes, and it’s an example of how hard it is for the lawyers and the scientists to understand each other.
But it’s a perfect conversation for the blogworld, and I’ll be pinging the author at PA to engage in a conversation. I’m still figuring out how to engage the community and this seems a good place to start :-)
More after the jump…
I’m not arguing in my talk that copyright should not apply to the scholarly articles themselves – it’s pretty clear that articles represent creative expressions, fixed in a tangible medium, which is all it takes to get a copyright. The author chooses the arrangement of the words, the flow and grace of literary styling, and fixes them in the medium of print (or digital print as the case may be). That right there brings the copyright down from the heavens.
But let’s zoom in on some of the things in the article. A statement like the following is a good example.
“Transglutaminase cross-links in intranuclear inclusions in Huntington disease” (from NCBI)
Now, this statement purports to lay out a fact. Not a creative expression. Remixing this statement renders it less true and not more true. Copyright isn’t supposed to protect this statement – it’s a fact of nature, not a creative styling…and the more creative it is, the less scientifically interesting, right? Its scientific value is a function of its truth, not its creativity, at least as I understand it…
This is what I was getting at in the talk. The copyright on the overall article, that comes from the connectors and the clause structures, is being used to control the movement of the facts of the experiment, which are themselves (at least supposedly) true in some epistemic sense. That seems insane to me. These are facts of nature and should be extractable separate from the copyright of the article, so that we can start to tie all the database entries about transglutaminase to all the papers mentioning transglutaminase.
PA, what do you say? Does this make more sense?
Last updated:
Wednesday, 26 Mar
2008 - 23:36 UTC
John, the link to the MIT seems incorrect. Try this instead.
I watched and enjoyed the talk a few weeks ago.
I actually stumbled upon the JA blog the other day and made contact with the author and hope that they will indeed engage in conversation here.
Thanks Graham, link’s fixed…
Thanks for the response! I apologize, I’m not sure what the technical issue was with commenting on the original article.
My gut feeling was that indeed I wasn’t parsing this idea of “creative works” in the way you intended, and the more detailed example given here is much more clear.
The issue is one of: how do you extricate the “non-creative facts” from the creative, copyrighted work? This is possible of course with machine-readable formatting and public deposition of the manuscript or text mining of articles. You point out that this is explicitly forbidden in most licensing agreements, and I agree that this is heavy-handed stuff from publishers.
The good news is that the cleanest current source of many of these facts is currently in the title and abstract of an article, most likely because these are necessarily short statements of the content. These are also the most amenable to text-mining approaches, as they are often publicly accessible through PubMed for instance. Of course it would be better if all of the article text was open access (that’s why I personally care so much about this goal).
It’s clear that locking scientific knowledge (in the form of scholarly articles) behind a subscription wall is an inherently unjust condition (especially when funded by public money).
At the risk of running on too long, I’ll leave this comment here and wait to ramble on more as others leave their own thoughts.