The Scourge of Rumpelstiltskin
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 by Patrick Ross
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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.
September 11th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Government funds research for the public good. Any profits made from this endeavour are great for the people involved and come in the form of patents, commercialized research, etc. But the majority of the utility of this funded research is to the paying public, whose money paid for the research. The scientific output of this funded research is the scientific paper. I don’t see why I as a tax payer should pay extra to see the results of research I helped fund.
BTW, copyright has nothing to do with this issue. Whether your work gets published by the NIH or by a journal, the results are the same, your name is on the paper, you are recognized as the author and copyrighted owner of the information, and you did not get a DIME from this publication. Whether your work gets published in an open, or closed access journal, no one’s going to pay you for using the work unless you have a separate and independent patent/licensing scheme worked out, in which case, you patent before you publish. Once you publish, the work is in public domain, and will be used by others without compensation to you whether it is open or closed. Publishing preserves your copyright, however you chose to do it.
Open access to scientific information cannot possibly chill the expression of this information. The only people who benefit from closing access to publicly funded research are the journal companies, who act as gatekeepers collecting toll from everyone involved in the process, the author, the referees and the public while not paying ANYONE for this work. Why should government subsidize their existence?
There are several alternatives to the traditional publishing model, like PLOS that respect copyright, and fully follow the peer review system while providing open and free access to the world. As someone who grew up in a poor country and had to do research, the availability of journal articles due to cost considerations was always limited and this absolutely chilled our capacity to do research. I, for one, will never wish that problem on anyone.
September 11th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Thanks for your comments.
There certainly is merit to papers resulting from government-funded research being available to the public, and you are right that there are many publishing models out there. No one is saying that any one model should be superior to another. But in this case, one model was singled out.
Journals are of course available to the public for free in libraries or generally at small cost per paper at journal web sites, but I acknowledge this is not as widely available as the general public.
Still, it’s apparently good enough for NSF. If you read the National Science Foundation Authorization Act, you’ll see NSF must “provide the public a readily accessible summary of the outcomes of NSF-sponsored projects,” along with “citations to journal publications” in which funded researchers have published articles regarding such research. In other words, NSF — the largest government sponsor of scientific research — can serve the public good by summarizing papers and guiding the curious to the original source of those papers.
NIH isn’t taking for posting every paper written by a funded scientist. They aren’t even taking for posting every paper that has gone through a journal peer review process. They are only taking for posting papers that have survived a peer review process AND have been accepted for publication. That means NIH is not taking the vast majority of papers resulting from their funding. The journals are serving as the filters for NIH, assuring the agency only gets the best science. The thanks the journals get for that service is being able to profit from the works for one year, a very short copyright term indeed.
September 16th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Your representation of the science/paper/funding ecosystem is egregiously wrong, demonstrating either a complete failure of understanding, or, more likely, a paid advertisement on the part of the journal companies.
Scientists want to do science. To do science, they need to demonstrate to funding sources that the science they do is useful and solid. They demonstrate this by showing that peer review committees think their paper is worth touting, and by bragging about citations their paper has gotten from other working scientists.
The journal companies charge scientists to publish papers because they are providing the service of “vetting” the paper, making it more valuable. Citations, though, come only after other scientists have read the paper, and the more who read it, the more who might cite it.
The scientist has no use for copyright. Only the journal company that wants the right to impede the progress of science until someone hands them money they did not earn would complain about the government serving the common good in this instance.