Subject: Re: Chronicle of Higher Education Article on "Self-Publication" From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 22:38:32 +0000 (GMT) |
On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Laurence Bebbington wrote: >sh> (1) Researchers are not self-PUBLISHING, they are self-ARCHIVING their >sh> research, both before (preprints) and after publishing it in >sh> peer-reviewed journals (postprints). >sh> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4 > > You may consider that the posting of a pre-print is self-archiving > rather than self-publishing and you are perfectly entitled to argue for > your distinction. I appreciate your views on copyright etc. but it might > be mentioned that s.175 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 > states quite clearly that: > " ... "publication", in relation to a work -- > > (a) means the issue of copies to the public, and > (b) includes, in the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic > work, making it available to the public by means of an electronic > retrieval system; and related expressions shall be construed accordingly." > > Quite clearly, whatever distinctions you wish to make, it would seem > that the mounting of a literary work on a pre-print server constitutes > "publishing" in law, since a literary work is being made available to the > public by means of an electronic retrieval system. It seems to me that > this is quite an important point. In a purely legal sense the work is > "published" and certain consequences inevitably flow from that fact. > > Laurence W. Bebbington, Law Librarian, The University of Nottingham We have been around this many times before, most recently on this thread: "Garfield: 'Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication'" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2239.html but since this is a crusade, I will shoulder the cross of summarizing, yet again, the salient points and distinctions: (1) Please distinguish the (interesting) question of (p) what counts as a "publication" in law from the (interesting, but rather different) question of (q) what counts as a publication for your promotion/tenure committee or for the RAE (which, generously, has formally proclaimed from the outset that publication in a peer-reviewed electronic journal DOES count -- but self-publishing, be it ever so compliant with s.175 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act, does not). (2) Both questions raise issues, but not the same issues! Let's call one set of issues, those pertaining to "legality" (copyright, royalties, priority, plagiarism, etc.), the "p" issues (giving them primacy for the "p-word") and the other set of issues, those pertaining to "quality" (peer-review, vanity press, etc.), the "q" issues. (3) One can ask "What counts as a publication" in either the "p" or "q" sense. (4) The CHE article in question -- about publishers trying to persuade university libraries not to encourage their authors to "self-publish" -- was in fact not (this time) a legalistic appeal, invoking publication in the Patent-Act sense "p," and threatening to prosecute for copyright violation. This time it was mostly an appeal on the basis of "q": that authors are better off sticking to the traditional peer-reviewed publication offered by peer-reviewed journals, rather than "self-publishing" unrefereed work on their own. (5) And the point of my reply was that they are not "self-publishing" unrefereed work on their own. Their unrefereed preprints may count as publications-p for lawyers, but they don't count as publications-q for their RAE assessors. Hence it is not the self-archiving of their unrefereed preprints that is of primary interest, but their self-archiving of their refereed, published postprints (or, if they feel restrained by copyright Angst, their self-archiving of their unrefereed preprints plus the file listing the corrigenda that would turn the preprint into the postprint). http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publisher-forbids (5) It is about the postprint -- the q-print, if you prefer -- that I reminded the author of the CHE article that we are discussing self-archiving here, not self-publishing. (But if you prefer, you may read that as re-p-publishing of an already p-published and q-published paper. In any case, immaterial to the point at issue, which was simply that the papers in question have already been published -- by the journal publisher!) (6) You are no doubt interested in the p-status of the self-archived preprint: Fine. It is p-published but not q-published. (7) The RAE only cares about q-publication. (8) The CHE article was appealing to authors' (and libraries) q-sense, on this occasion, not their p-sense. (9) Hence the vexed issue of what p-publication does or not count for -- for anyone but a lawyer -- never even arose. (10) Which is not to say it has not arisen before. Please see the threads: "Chron. High. Ed. 18 September on Cal Tech & Copyright" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0103.html "Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1583.html "Copyright, Embargo, and the Ingelfinger Rule" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0496.html "Evolving Publisher Copyright Policies On Self-Archiving" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2350.html "Legal ways around copyright for one's own giveaway texts" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0541.html "PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1309.html and passim. 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 & 02): 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 the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm the SPARC position paper on institutional repositories: http://www.unites.uqam.ca/src/sante.htm the OAI site: http://www.openarchives.org and the free OAI institutional archiving software site: http://www.eprints.org/
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