Subject: Re: Garfield: "Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication" From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2002 16:28:17 +0100 (BST) |
On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Joseph Pietro Riolo wrote: > On Sat, 31 Aug 2002, Stevan Harnad <harnad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > These two papers by Eugene Garfield -- founder of the Institute for > > Scientific Information, Current Contents, Science Citation Index, > > and originator of the Citation Impact Factor -- might be of interest to > > the Open Access community: > > > > "I believe that posting and sharing one's preliminary publications > > [is] an important part of the peer... review process and does > > not justify an embargo by publishers on the grounds of 'prior > > publication'. It was not the case before the Internet, and except > > for unusual clinical situations, has not changed because of the > > convenience of the Internet." (Garfield, 2000) > http://www.the-scientist.library.upenn.edu/yr1999/June/comm_990607.html > > Apparently, both Stevan Harnad and Eugene Garfield are ignorant of > the definition of "publication" in the U.S. Copyright Law: > > "Publication" is the distribution of copies or > phonorecords of a work to the public by sale or other > transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. > The offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a > group of persons for purposes of further distribution, > public performance, or public display, constitutes > publication. A public performance or display of a work > does not of itself constitute publication. > > (Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 101.) > > Before Internet, submitting an article to a review committee is > not considered as a publication because the author does not intend > for the public to see the article and does not allow the committee > to further distribute copies. However, when an author puts his > article on Internet without any control over who can see his article > and distribute copies of his article, his article is considered as > a publication. This is a red herring, conflating researchers' criteria for what counts as a formal publication with trade criteria for protecting toll-revenues. First (but irrelevantly) there are glaring logical incoherences in the above definition of "publication" in U.S. Copyright Law when it comes to online digital works. I will not bother pointing out all the counterexamples and non-fitting cases that this quoted definition obviously cannot handle, because there is a far more pertinent reason why all of this is irrelevant to the literature that Gene Garfield and I are talking about here -- refereed research publications. When it comes to the definition of "publication" in the only sense that is relevant to the authors of this special literature -- "publishing" as in "publish or perish" -- no promotion committee or grant-funding panel will count vanity-press self-publication as "publication," regardless of whether the author has self-published one copy on a piece of paper shown to one colleague or has spammed the entire internet with it: Self-publication is not publication insofar as researchers' careers and reward systems are concerned (with one prominent exception, namely, the establishment of priority as to who actually made a finding first -- but for that, even one copy whose date of creation can be objectively authenticated is enough). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4 The reason is simple: Far, far too much research is done, and it varies far too wildly in quality, for researchers to be able to trust unfiltered self-reports, or to evaluate it all for themselves in each instance, in deciding what to read, believe, use. To count as publications in academia's formal publish-or-perish sense -- the only sense that matters for research -- research-reports have to successfully pass the self-corrective "filter" of peer-review, and be duly certified by the publisher's imprimatur as having done so, through being accepted for publication (sic) by a peer-reviewed journal (preferably an established one of known quality standards). Until they have done so, all papers are just unrefereed, unpublished preprints (and, if cited in a published work, must be clearly identified as such), whether they have been seen only by one pair of eyes or have been advertised far and wide in infomercials on international TV. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/guide.htm#preprint THIS is the sense of publication that Gene is talking about and this should already have been obvious from the fact that he uses the word "publication" in both senses in the very same sentence above, in answering (in the negative) his own question, namely, "Is Acknowledged Self-Archiving Prior Publication?" And he is addressing this question to fellow-researchers -- authors, referees, and editors -- not to drafters of copyright law. WHY was this question not addressing copyright law or copyright lawyers? Because, if you will look carefully at every one of the criteria invoked in the legal "definition" of publication above -- "sale, transfer of ownership, rental, lease, lending" -- every single one of them is utterly irrelevant to the special, anomalous literature which is the only one of which we are speaking here. For refereed research publications are all author give-aways: Their authors do not seek to sell, rent, lease, lend or otherwise transfer their ownership. Their "moral ownership" -- i.e., the fact that it is they who wrote them and not someone else -- is of course retained by these special authors, as by all authors. But the texts themselves are all given away; not a penny of royalties or fees or other form of income from their sale/rental/lease/lending is received or sought by their authors. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#5 Hence these authors, and the users of this special literature (namely, other researchers, their institutions, and their research-funding agencies) have no interest whatsoever in copyright "protection" for sale/rental/lease/lending. Apart from copyright protection of their authorship -- which they can already assert on the one copy they submit to be considered for publication (sic) by a refereed journal -- these authors are not in need of copyright law's elaborate measures to toll-gate access to copies of their work. And that includes any definition of "publication" that is formulated in the service of protecting the toll-gating itself -- as it is for the much larger corpus of non-give-away literature, for which copyright law was formulated, and to which it is applicable. So let the tradesmen concern themselves with how to define "publication" in order to protect their toll-revenues, but let the give-away researchers define "publication" in terms of what it really means in their peer-reviewed, publish/perish world -- the only world to which Gene's recommendations about the self-archiving of unrefereed, unpublished research was addressed. Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html or http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: september98-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
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