Scientists who want to describe their work on Wikipedia should not be forced to give up the kudos of a respected journal. So says a group of physicists who are going head-to-head with a publisher because it will not allow them to post parts of their work to the online encyclopaedia, blogs and other forums.
The physicists were upset after the American Physical Society withdrew its offer to publish two studies in Physical Review Letters because the authors had asked for a rights agreement compatible with Wikipedia.
And the point is?
This has been the case for many years, you sign away your copyright to get your work published. So many scientists don’t seem to realise this fact!
Of course it’s not right and it’s the publishers making large amounts of money for little work but it’s not exactly news. The number of scientists who are dumbfounded and confused when you actually tell them they don’t own their own work is amazing.
Of course with the increased number of groups (eg all the UK Research Councils, NIH grant holders) having an OA Mandate the publishers will have to change from taking copyright to being given a license to publish, which would have solved this problem. Of course doing that actually costs you maybe a few thousand dollars but hey, taking peoples work, getting other scientists to review that work, not paying them and then putting it through Word to put your own typographical imprint on a paper is hard work.
Publishing is actually hard work
I completely agree about the preference for a license to publish rather than a wholesale copyright transfer (in fact, the Medical Library Association did exactly that several years ago while I was editor of the JMLA). However, the notion that publishers are making large amounts of money for little work is, if you’ll forgive my saying so, extremely ignorant of what is actually involved in publishing. Until librarians as a group take the trouble to actually learn about what publishing involves, and can cogently discuss the issues (and the distinctions among large & small, for-profit and not-for-profit publishers) surrounding the economics of scholarly publishing, we will not be taken seriously by publishers — and we shouldn’t be. If, on the other hand, we really want to be a force in transforming the scholarly communication system, we need to develop expertise about publishing and grapple with the real issues, rather than making snarky (and silly) comments implying that publishing is nothing more than running somebody else’s work through a word processor. That’s about as accurate as suggesting that we can get rid of all the librarians because all anybody needs now is Google.