JuriScientia - Latest Comments

Re: Top Science/Law Story of 2012: Manslaughter Conviction of Seismologists

Teddy — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 11:36:08 -0000

It is illegal to fail to yell fire in a crowded theater.

Re: You Get What You Pay For

Patrick Boucher — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:47:31 -0000

YouKnowBestOfAll,

Thank you for taking the time to comment. I agree with much of what you say, and have also experienced the frustration of trying to get access to an article (that my tax dollars paid to fund!) only to find after I've paid for it that the actual content is of little use to me. Those who work in institutions that provide access to a wide range of journals have a much different experience than those of us who need to decide on an individual basis whether to pay for an article.

While I appreciate the need for publishers to have enough revenue to finance their operations, I think the scholarly societies tend to be more sensitive to disseminating articles widely since they are not-for-profit organizations. At the risk of engaging in "advertising" of the sort that caused Barschall much grief, I note that the APS (the publisher with which I am most familiar) recently made all of its journals (dating back to 1893) freely available to anyone in a public library. I anticipate similar efforts among other scholarly societies (which might even already be under way).

One motivation for requesting copyrights, particularly among the scholarly-society publishers, is to have the ability to engage in further dissemination of the article after its initial publication. This was a consideration, for instance, in making back issues of journals available online when the original publication contemplated only print publication. The specific issue you mention - the "work made for hire" - can usually be addressed, but many are either unaware or lax about the issue.

You may find these letters to the Editor of the New York Times to be of some interest if you have not already seen them:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01...

Patrick

Re: You Get What You Pay For

YouKnowBestOfAll — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:18:05 -0000

One should distinguish between “personal use” and “commercial use”. Without any question, anyone should pay for the “commercial use” of something. The right question here is: “Should the public pay twice for accessing what is essentially PUBLIC information?” In many cases, when reading a paper, members of the public do not get what they
have paid for.

See my opinion below:

For Universal and Free Access to All Public Information
Opinion

I believe that everyone has experienced different levels of frustration when one is asked to pay USD 30.00 up to 60.00 (or even more) just to see an article (or even a letter to the editor) which, during the reading, the reader may realise is of little or even no use at all for him/her.

Some people may say that this is solely a problem of the reader as s/he has decided, after reading the Abstract, that the material would worth paying for it. Indeed, such practice is so wide-spread that it is considered to be the norm.

However, apart from the ethical issues, there are legal problems related to this.

First, in many cases the reader has little or even no information in regard to what actually one is going to purchase. At best one can get only a vague idea from the Abstract, if such exists. Often a small Extract (the first 100 or so words) is offered, and there are numerous cases when there is nothing – neither abstract nor extract, so the reader should make decision based only on the title and authors’ names. This is like “buying a cat in a sack” – one never knows what s/he will get, and in many cases it is not even clear if the “thing” in the sack is a “cat” or may be something else. In some civilized countries trade authorities would consider such practice as “misleading and deceptive conduct”, which incurs hefty fines.

Second, in most cases the journal asks the authors to assign all rights in the work to the journal. However, in many cases the authors actually don’t have such right – to assign copyrights – since the copyrights do not belong to them. This is so, because in most cases the work (research, study, etc.) has been funded predominantly (or even entirely) with public money. In most jurisdictions around the world it is explicitly stated that all rights in such works belong not to the creator, but to the funding body, unless specified otherwise. By assigning copyrights of the work to the journal authors “assign” something which is not theirs, but in fact belongs to the public. Therefore, the validity of such assigning is highly questionable, if legal at all.

In conclusion, with the exception of the open access journals, current practice of paid access to articles de facto restricts the dissemination of public information, which per se is not in the public interest. Therefore, the access to any work funded entirely or even in part by the public, no matter in what form, should be universal and free of charge for personal use from the public.

Re: JuriSnippet: Recent Developments in US Patent Law

mmowery — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:51:20 -0000

Great, look forward to reading it.