APS Copyright Policy Update
October 2, 2008 | 8:09 pm
In an editorial on APS’ website today, APS’ editor-in-chief Gene Sprouse announced that the Americal Physical Society would allow authors of articles in its journals to keep certain rights under their copyright transfer agreement.
Specifically, APS will allow authors to retain copyright, not of the article itself, but of most “derivitave works” that the author might make from the original article. This is useful, and laudable, because one such derivative work might be reworking pieces of the article for posting on a site such as Wikipedia, which often require articles to use a copyleft or commons type license like the GNU Free Document License. These types of licenses simply ensure that the article may be freely reproduced and redistributed, often provided it is kept under the same license and properly attributed. These conditions are often incompatible with some publishers’ mandates that authors give the journal the copyright to the original article and any derivative works.
Beyond sites such as Wikipedia, Copyright Transfer Agreements might also affect an author’s legal ability to give a talk based on a paper, or to write a summary of such a talk for a proceedings, or several other common circumstances. APS’ modifications to their agreements obviate most copyright concerns about these practices.
As I’ve written here before, physicists are beginning to take control of the ways in which their work is disseminated. Rather than coping with overly burdensome processes that no longer make sense for the way scientists communicate, authors of physics papers are starting to see that they have very real influence on the exact terms on which they publish. In this case, many authors (and presumably APS members) brought the matter to APS’ attention, and APS was able to improve the situation. See Jonathan Oppenheim’s page about the subject for more information about the context, the backstory, and some of the people involved in making this change come about.
Hopefully, the story doesn’t end here. As Oppenheim points out, some publishers no longer require that authors give up the copyright to what is, after all, their own work. APS cites the very real concern about changes in technology possibly invalidating some limited licenses in the future, and one also might worry about the publisher’s ability to continue to charge for something they don’t own. However, it is worth noting that not all publishers seem to think copyright transfer is necessary to ensure preservation of papers and journal revenues. The Royal Society, for example, requires only a “nonexclusive license to distribute.” arXiv.org, also has an interest in being able to move articles to different media as technology changes, and they also require only a nonexclusive license to distribute.
I applaud APS’ decision to relax their copyright policy, in so doing they continue to be responsive to the changing world of publishing and, more importantly, responsive to the needs of the scientific community that they serve. It is unfortunate, to me, that they did not feel able to go even further, and allow authors to retain copyright over their own work. I hope that in due time this too will come as authors, and the field as a whole, start to recognize that they have the final say in what happens to the fruits of their labors. If current methods of scientific communication are too restrictive for scientists, scientists can change them.
Travis Brooks
Posted in Uncategorized |
October 6th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
To begin, we thank Travis Brooks for highlighting the enhanced author rights in the recently-revised APS copyright agreement. At the same time we want to continue his discussion by responding to his suggestion that in the future APS should leave copyright with authors, perhaps following the approaches of The Royal Society or arXiv.org.
We have had a long, mutually supportive relationship with arXiv, and we applaud its contributions to the scientific community. Nevertheless, arXiv and APS play complementary roles in advancing our shared goal of enhanced scientific communication, and this leads to different issues regarding copyright. Unlike arXiv, which rapidly posts manuscripts exactly as they are received from authors, APS manages careful peer review, XML composition and tagging, copy editing, and reference linking, and then maintains the final versions of the resulting papers in a comprehensive online archive of the Physical Review back to 1893 (PROLA). These steps, and the contributions of editors, referees, copy editors, and compositors, transform a submitted article into a verified piece of the core knowledge of the field, which is attributed to the author, but now “belongs” to the community. APS takes copyright for the resulting final version of the article so that we can preserve the article and provide the article to the community in perpetuity. These contributions (beyond those provided by arXiv) cost money, and are a responsibility that we at APS feel deeply, and believe we must approach conservatively. Taking copyright but then returning very generous rights to authors seems to us the most effective way to meet our responsibilities without impeding the progress of science or our authors’ needs.
The Royal Society’s goals and concerns are presumably similar to ours, and their approach, an exclusive license to publish, may seem an attractive alternative to taking copyright. However, their license to publish comes with a number of supplementary restrictions, and when these restrictions are read carefully, it turns out that the Royal Society is actually less generous to authors than is APS. For example, the Royal Society never allows the posting of their published version of a paper on the author’s or author’s institution’s website, as does APS, and allows the author’s final postprint version to be posted on an institutional website only at least 12 months after publication (APS has no embargo). The APS policy is much better for authors, even if it superficially sounds more restrictive.
Joseph W. Serene, Treasurer/Publisher, APS and
Gene D. Sprouse, Editor in Chief, APS
October 6th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
You’re welcome.
I didn’t mean to suggest that HEP researchers publish in Royal Soc. journals. I agree that their other restrictions are not reasonable for our field. However, to the untrained eye (as mine certainly is), the restrictions you mention don’t have much to do with the copyright versus license distinction, but perhaps I am wrong about that.
As for arXiv, certainly your goals and methods are completely different, justifiably so. However, in the editorial you point to the needs of preservation through various media types as a reason for holding copyright rather than a license, and arXiv’s interests, in this limited respect, are surely not so different from APS.
It seems to me that in an ideal world, the authors of papers would retain the copyright to their work and a publisher would by justly compensated for their valuable services in producing and preserving it, either by profiting from the distribution of such work, or by some direct payment for services rendered, or both.
Of course, I recognize our world is far from ideal, and the restrictions imposed by APS, the Royal Society, and others may indeed be necessary at this point. I simply wanted to point out that, to me, the logical conclusion of this copyright issue had not yet been reached.
I don’t imagine we really disagree much about this at all, and we certainly agree on the main point of my post, which is that scientists can and should be involved with the publishing process and make sure it meets their needs. Indeed, as you point out, APS has been a leader in this regard, responding to the needs of the community by working with arXiv (and SPIRES as well!) and creating sensible policies like this.