A story to explain why it’s so important House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) has introduced legislation (HR-6845) last night to reaffirm the rights of copyright owners in the field of medical journals:

Imagine you’re a scientist. Like most scientists, you look all over for funding for your research. University fellowships, commercial sponsorship, foundation grants, and yes, federal funding. But did you know that if you’re doing medical research, from core research to clinical trials, and you choose to accept a portion of federal funding, you’ve just signed your work over to them?

Yes, essentially you’ve become a work-for-hire employee of the federal government. But there’s another twist. The government doesn’t necessarily want your paper. Can’t get through the peer review process of a medical journal? You can keep the paper. Got through the peer review process but were still rejected for publication by the journal. Keep the paper. Got the paper published? Congratulations! Like Rumpelstiltskin, the feds will be back in a year to take your baby, and they’ll display it for everyone in the town square.

Sounds crazy, right? I mean, the federal government can’t do that, can they? Well, they have. They did it by bypassing the committees of jurisdiction over copyright and using the appropriations process. They chose not to amend copyright law, and in fact insist this has nothing to do with copyright, even though the copyright term of journals has effectively been reduced to one year.

As someone who spent most of my career as a reporter, I am a firm believer in open government and a strong supporter of FOIA (Freedom of Information Act). But these research articles are not government documents. If they were, they would be produced by government employees and would be part of the public domain. The very fact that the appropriators chose to take the works directly from the copyright holders (the publishers) shows that this has nothing to do with forcing the revelation of government documents and everything to do with a government taking.

The core research performed by these scientists – research data, clinical trials – is all reported back to funders and generally is shared immediately with the scientific community. We all get back what the government funded. The paper, however, should a scientist choose to write it, is not science per se; it is one (or more) scientist’s interpretation of scientific research. It is, therefore, a creative expression of ideas, the very definition of a copyrighted work. And that copyright is something that, in order to spread knowledge and achieve peer recognition, the scientist often transfers to a prestigious journal.

Co-opting journals as a pre-screening process for scientific papers desired by the federal government is not a way to encourage journals, many of them relying heavily on subscription fees due to a limited pool of potential advertisers, to continue publishing, or publishing at the same volume. If a scientist appreciates the peer review process and the prestige and attention that comes from being published in such a review, they will be dismayed at the government’s potential erosion of that industry. And all of us want these scientists to write their interpretations of their research so that other scientists – who read these journals when they come out – can build on their work.

It’s a shame to see the federal funding process for scientific research, in attempting to further disseminate the results of scientific research, has the potential to chill that very expression.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 2:12 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright law, creators. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.