March 14, 2008
Physicists Press Scholarly Society to Accept Open-Access Publishing
The American Physical Society will consider changing its copyright policy to be more accepting of open-access publishing, according to a forthcoming article in New Scientist.
According to the article, some physicists were frustrated that the society withdrew its offer to publish their studies in the journal Physical Review Letters after the authors asked the society for an agreement allowing them to republish their research in Wikipedia. About 40 physicists are asking the society to change its policy, which requires scientists to hand over their copyrights to the society before their works are published in the society’s journals.
Gene Sprouse, editor-in-chief of the group’s journals, is quoted saying that he will give serious consideration to the scientists’ request.—-Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Friday March 14, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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This is a pioneering, ineluctable, great step towards making knowledge and knowledge workers and knowledge-producing institutions of service to society rather than, like everything at Harvard, merely a tool of personal financial wealth building. More power to these scientists, liberating knowledge from greed a step at a time. Please publish the next several hundred such steps as they are taken.
— Richard Tabor Greene Mar 15, 10:31 AM #
Neither copyright nor contract law prevents these physicists from writing about their research in Wikipedia if they so desire. The only legal restriction they are under is not to republish their articles in the same form. They always have the option of expressing their ideas, and presenting their results, in alternative language. Ideas and facts are not copyrightable.
— Sandy Mar 17, 10:10 AM #
Sandy is right on the money. They can summarize their research for Wikipedia without any copyright infringement. But I’m surprised at APS being accused of this, with so many articles from Physical Review Letters available in arXiv. Some are pre-print, some are as accepted by the journal. They must have something about that in their agreement.
— Robin N Siinn Mar 17, 10:26 AM #
If this would have been around when Bohr was surpassing Einstein as the best mind of his generation, I could have saved Albert a lot of heartache by writing him an email that (a) told him he was my totally most bitchin’ favorite physicist, (b) asked for his official autographed photo (that I’d probably resell for boku $$ on eBay), and ‘(c) having read Bohr’s work on the Wikipedia, had concluded that God did play dice, IMHO.
— marci Mar 17, 08:39 PM #
APS has been a leader in Open Access publishing for many years, and we allow authors to post our final published version of their article on the author’s or the author’s institution’s web site, immediately on publication. If the authors wish to make their article available through Wikipedia, all they need do is place a link to one of these sites and the article will be freely available on the internet. Some members of the physics community do want more, and we will be discussing these needs with our need to sustain low cost publishing of important physics results.
— Gene Sprouse Mar 17, 10:32 PM #