Friday, March 07, 2008

Academic journals and copyrights

I was going through the new cond-mat arxiv listing today, and I found an item that had been accepted by Physical Review Letters but which had had its acceptance revoked by a disagreement over copyright laws. This was intriguing, so I looked it up and found the following discussion. I only skimmed through it, but I thought it would be an interesting thing to post here to see if any of you have any thoughts on the matter.

Here is a summary from the web page: "Recently, one of the APS journals, Physical Review Letters (PRL), rescinded their previous acceptance of two papers by myself and coauthors [OW][OSW]. This occurred because we wanted the option to contribute parts of our paper to the intellectual commons. While PRL had allowed such options in the past, and initially agreed that this was permissible, their current policy inadvertently prevents authors from posting their own figures on Wikipedia (for example)."

That's pretty lame of PRL. What they're doing doesn't exactly jive with their supposed mission of disseminating science. (It's worth mentioning that many of the other policies in their copyright agreement---such as not having a conniption about scientists posting material on their own websites---do jive with this mission. However, they're missing the boat when it comes to wikipedia and other such ventures.)

No comments: