Stuart Shieber, professor of computer science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and director of the university’s Office for Scholarly Communications, has an interesting blog post about authors posting articles on the web with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” sort of policy. It’s a long post, but worth reading it in full.
Excerpts:
A strange social contract has arisen in the scholarly publishing field, a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to online distribution of articles by authors. Publishers officially forbid online distribution, authors do it anyway without telling the publishers, and publishers don’t ask them to stop even though it violates contractual obligations. What happens when you refuse to play that game? Read on.
Publishing of research, in the sense of providing for its widespread dissemination, is the means by which new discoveries join the collective knowledge of humanity. The means by which the distribution is implemented has been subscription-based publication via a publisher. Indeed, until recently, this was the only practical means by which research could be distributed, since the cost of the dissemination, which involved printing and shipping of paper, showed economies of scale that individual researchers could not take advantage of. Publishers made revenue by limiting access to the papers to paying customers.
…This brings us to the strange social contract. What has arisen, perhaps surprisingly, is a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to online distribution by authors. Publishers officially forbid online distribution, authors do it anyway without telling the publishers, and publishers don’t ask them to stop even though it violates contractual obligations.
The standard system for scholarly communication is thus based on widespread contractual violation and fraud.
…Nonetheless, individual authors still breach contracts regularly as they act to maximize their career advancement possibilities. To many, including myself, this state of affairs is untenable. I am not willing to routinely violate contracts in this way. Consequently, I and others have for some time reconciled the two distribution mechanisms explicitly, by amending the contractual conditions of copyright assignments. For many years, I have as a matter of course refused to sign copyright assignment forms that do not give me the right of noncommercial online distribution of my work. Originally, I would use alternative copyright assignments that I wrote myself. More recently, I have been attaching the SPARC addendum to publishers’ assignment forms, and then the Science Commons addenda that superseded it.
In the many years that I have been routinely replacing or modifying copyright assignments, I have never had a complaint (or even an acknowledgment) from a publisher. In retrospect, this may make sense. Since the contractual modification applies only to a single article by a single author, it is unlikely that anyone looking for copyright clearance would even know that all copyright hadn’t been assigned to the publisher. And in any case publishers must realize that authors act as if they have a noncommercial distribution license whether they formally retain one or not.
I say that I’ve never had a complaint from a publisher, and that has been true with one exception. This post describes that singular case. It may serve to illuminate several points:
* How journal publishers think about rights.
* How the rights landscape might be changing.
* How authors can recoup positive progress.
I describe my experience in challenging an irrational and detrimental license clause, and how it spiraled into a battle that resulted in the publisher changing its policy for the journal as a whole.
Read on to find out what happened with Stuart’s experience with Blackwell.
