Ask Slashdot: Best Copyright Terms For a Thesis? 211
plopez gets in his first Slashdot submission with this question, writing: "I am wrapping up an MS. In the past I have had problems getting copies of others' work, due to lack of copyright notices on their thesis or dissertation. I don't want that happen to me. I know the joke is 'No one will ever read your thesis,' but in the slim chance it is useful to others I don't want them to be required to hunt me down for a release. Basically I want to say: 'Copyright is released as long as this work or excerpts is properly attributed. Also, any published excerpts cannot be copyrighted by other parties, nor can the original work in its entirety.' Is this good enough? I don't want to encumber legitimate uses of the work but I also don't want some pirate coming along and stealing it out of public domain. Is public domain good enough? Or does it allow the work to be restricted by commercial interests? I know of copyleft, but copyleft is a family of copyright notices and I am unsure which one is right for my intent. Please help."
You did check with your department first, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
All you have to do is say it's copyright... (Score:2, Insightful)
Science is based on open information sharing (Score:5, Insightful)
(with proper attribution)
Any restriction on this is a despicable attack on the advancement of science.
Current journal paywalls ought to be against the law. They ensure that only academia
at the richest institutions have full access to other scientists' work.
Academics at poorer institutions, here and around the world, and amateur researchers
who may be just as intelligent as the established, are shut out. It is an outrageous
and unjustifiable situation.
We need a different economic model to pay for the service of editing and coordinating
peer review. Maybe that cost ought to be covered by a journal submission fee.
Hardcopy publication is now officially not needed, nor should we be paying hardcopy publishing
companies just for the right to view the online published information. That's rubbish, and
it's harmful to the progress of knowledge.
Re:Science is based on open information sharing (Score:2, Insightful)
When you're ready to provide that different model for academic publishing (and pay for the transition and support for its administration), please let us know. Until then you're just another asshole telling people how they ought to act against their own interests, and against the quite valuable prevailing model of academic publication.
"Amateur researchers" include the worst of the cranks and religionists, who rightly face enormous hurdles to publication in respected journals.
And you think a poll tax is the answer? I'm not calling you a socialist or a loon; I'm calling you a moron.
Re:Creative commons! (Score:4, Insightful)
post it online; problem solved (Score:4, Insightful)
I am wrapping up an MS. In the past I have had problems getting copies of others' work, due to lack of copyright notices on their thesis or dissertation. I don't want that happen to me.
Post a digital copy online. Problem solved. As long as a digital copy is available for free online, others will have access to it, regardless of its copyright status. If you're in a field like physics, you could post it on arxiv.org. If you're in a field that doesn't have anything like arxiv, just post it on your own site, or on a site such as scribd.
Re:Science is based on open information sharing (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a remarkably naive viewpoint. I am responding only because it has been modded (at this point) to +3.
Journals who require payment for full text or PDF download do not "ensure that only academia and the richest institutions have full access ..." I work at one of the oldest and most famous institutions in the world. Many of the journals where my peers publish are not on the subscription list, and thus I must pay for each access. So, that assertion is not true.
Each paper costs perhaps $10 to $20. Please show me someone who is smart and motivated enough to be able to contribute to scientific thought and advancement who cannot afford that on occasion. And yes, I pay for those articles out of my own pocket.
Before the Internet, we had manuscript request cards where, if you saw a paper referenced, you could send a card to the author, and they would mail you back a hardcopy of the manuscript. Up until a few years ago, I would still get one every now and then from somewhere in the far east or Africa. The cost for those is a stamp and a postcard. Please show me someone -- anyone, even one person -- who is sane enough to be able to contribute to science and cannot afford that.
Even now, most publishers allow authors to post PDFs of their work on the author's private web site. If you can afford internet access, you can get nearly every paper. If you can't get one immediately, you can still send email to the author and request a copy in the email equivalent of the post cards from yesteryear. Please show me anyone -- even one person -- who can afford internet access who cannot get email access and request PDFs, or printed manuscripts, that way.
Yes, it is not quite as convenient as being able to immediately download manuscripts from the publisher's web sites as soon as they are published. Boo-hoo. I can't afford to live in the best neighborhood, and that impedes my ability to be a professional scientist because I have a longer commute. Is that also despicable? Should I be allowed to live in the best areas for no cost just because I *want* to?
Modern science, in most but not all fields, is an expensive proposition. The days of amateur scientists making serious contributions in all but a small number of areas are long gone. Saying that we must make all access free (and thus eliminating the valuable filtering service that the journals provide) is a nice pipe-dream but is not rooted in reality. Furthermore, a smart and sufficiently motivated person can make contributions to science -- I had an intern two summers ago who overcame some serious hurdles, including coming from a third-world country, stayed 1-1/2 months in my lab and did enough work to have two publications come out of it -- and not having immediate and free access to all articles is not a limiting factor.
Really? This is your best effort? (Score:3, Insightful)
Warning: --Flammable Objects ahead!--
You're polishing your thesis, the crown jewel of a Masters of Science degree, and you can't figure this one out on your own?
Worse, you ask HERE!?!
Hint: Perhaps you should harness some of the experience in researching that you've piled into the past 5-7 years of academia, along with INSIDER ACCESS to academia to get an answer and recommendation worthy of consideration. Does your university have a law school? Go find a member of the legal faculty with some modern clue in the field of intellectual property.
On the other hand, you could rely on the 2^n monkeys on the Internet banging random crapola into keyboards to eventually come up with the "right answer".
Oh, wait......
( Sheesh.... )
Red
Re:Say WHAT? (Score:3, Insightful)
With Google around, plagiarists would have to be idiots to try it at this point.
What I want to do when I read a paper is learn something I can use to make my code better, or to learn that the problem is way harder than I thought and I need to find a workaround. The problem these days is actually being able to read papers without being affiliated with a university, because so many papers are behind publisher paywalls or trapped on internal-only university servers. Someone having to pay what a textbook costs to read a ten year old paper is probably not what the author had in mind when they wrote it.
Please whatever copyright you use, post the paper online so bright but indigent students can read it.
Re:Science is based on open information sharing (Score:3, Insightful)
(posting from my phone)
In my field I have published over 2,000 articles over the years - over 100 in peer reviewed journals.
The model needs to change.
Most of these research papers are funded by public research dollars.
Those research dollars paid by publication fees to the publishers (yes, we have to PAY THEM to publish our papers).
Others do the peer review for FREE (I know I have never been paid to do a peer review - and I have done many)
The publishing houses get the publication fee (which can be substantial), charge for the journal (again, not the cost of popular science), charge for database access (again, fairly good $$ in this alone), and charge more for individual papers (The best part is that they all claim they are poor doing so!)
For what, exactly?
The NIH got it right requiring all NIH funded research to be published in pubmed.
The public should have access to them.
It's no longer the 1800's or even the 1900's. Its 2011, and its time to open the flood gates of information.
ND ? you're on crack. (Score:3, Insightful)
Please do not *ever* recommend ND for anything of this nature again.
Think about it -- research builds upon other research. That's the whole point of publishing research.
We *want* people to build on the work. ND *specifically* tells people 'you're not allowed to do *anything* with my research'. SA's another messy one, as it sets a restriction on derivatives.
The best thing authors should do is to make sure that they don't lose their rights to the document, so that they can re-distribute the paper, no matter what stupidity the journal publishers do. And for that, see Creative Common's Scholar's Copyright Project:
http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/ [sciencecommons.org]
Re:Science is based on open information sharing (Score:2, Insightful)
What an incredibly stupid viewpoint!
"Boo-hoo"?! Wow, dude...
Instant online access to all academic papers would *obviously* accelerate advances in all fields of research. Any expense or inconvenience simply introduces pointless waste in the process.
Also, having all papers freely available online would allow automated searches and inferences to be made. For example, consider the story of the former Reddit co-owner -- now only 20 year old -- who was arrested for "excessive JSTOR downloads". With access to all of the documents he downloaded, he was able to derive novel and significant facts. That's the kind of research that is hindered by limited access to documents. As "automated scientists" and other bots rival the inference abilities of humans, access to research data will be even more crucial to rapid technological development.
Re:Science is based on open information sharing (Score:4, Insightful)
Not every field operates the same way. Perhaps you only need to access other papers "on occasion". In my field I need to check 50-100 papers during the research that goes into every one that I write. Why is it reasonable for me to be charged $500-2000 by publishers to access research that they did not create? Not all publishers allow private copies of papers to be hosted on a researcher's website. I trust that your field is not dominated by the IEEE and ACM?
Free access does not imply lack of review. Your point about journals providing filtering is flawed - just look at any of the newer open access journals in CS that do provide filtering by reviewing.
Re:Science is based on open information sharing (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, modern science is expensive. But that cost does not come out of the journal publishers' pockets. It is funded by taxpayers and private investors. Furthermore, the editors and reviewers of the journals are scientists in the filed. They don't get any monetary compensation for their work. So journals have a crazy sweet business model: they get copyrights to a product that was completely created without any cost to them and then they get to sell it back to the community who created the product.
Publishers are an ADDITIONAL and UNNECESSARY cost to doing science. The service they provide nowadays is trivial. You could organize and publish a journal on the internet for a fraction of the price (and people do). We are stuck with payed journals because they have good impact factors (resulting from past publications). Individual scientists need to publish in high impact factor journals to progress in their careers. So it's very hard to break the cycle.
But make no mistake: this is not capitalism. No value is being generated by the journals (at least not close to how much they charge, by any stretch of the imagination). In the XXI century, conventional payed scientific journals are a bug. And we have to debug the system sooner or later.
Re:Science is based on open information sharing (Score:2, Insightful)
Your reasons are completely understandable, but as a hobby programmer I can't afford a pile of papers every evening when I don't even know if the contents has any practical usage or is relevant for what I need (abstracts are very vague on practical implementations). Looking for papers on Google very often dead-ends on a paywall. If your PDF paper is not directly linked form relevant Wikipedia pages, I'm not even going to waste time looking for it.
This could very well result in me inventing something very similar to your paper. This only wastes my time, not yours, but don't expect me to acknowledge or even attribute your paper.