BioMed Central copyright policy -- Stevan Harnad Stephen D. Clark 09 Feb 2000 21:41 UTC
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: BioMed Central copyright policy Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 17:33:16 +0000 From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk> Some very fundamental and explicit clarification is required before it can be decided whether BioMed Central should be embraced or avoided by authors: What is meant by asking authors to sign "non-exclusive rights to republish and redistribute the research"? If I have written a preprint, deposited it in BioMed Central, and submitted it to for refereeing to Nature (a journal which DOES allow author self-archiving of preprints), what am I expected to sign over to BioMed Central? Nature is to be commended for not trying to prevent author self-archiving, but ON NO ACCOUNT should the publisher of Nature countenance the author's having given ANOTHER PUBLISHER "non-exclusive rights to republish and redistribute" the paper just submitted to Nature. The innocent reply to this would be: "All that Biomed Central means by this is the right to archive it online for free for all." The non-innocent answer would be: "BioMed Central has further plans for the papers deposited in it, apart from archiving them online free for all." For those plans could compete with Nature's, in which case Nature would be quite right not to want to have anything to do with papers for which authors have signed such agreements, and authors in turn would be quite right to sign no such agreements. So if all that's meant is the right to archive online publicly for free for all, a very different wording is needed (if any wording is needed at all: I note that the Los Alamos Physics ArXiv found no need to ask authors to sign anything at all; nor did CogPrints, nor RepEc, nor any Open Archive, as far as I know). And now we come to an even more fundamental question: What about when I want to deposit a paper in BioMed Central that has been refereed and accepted by Nature? Here again, Nature would be in the wrong if it tried to prevent me from publicly self-archiving my refereed research online for free for all, but it would be entirely in the right if I tried to give to any other publisher the "non-exclusive rights to republish and redistribute" it. Only Nature should have the right to republish and redistribute my paper. I need retain only the right to self-archive it publicly online, free for all. That's all that's at issue in freeing the research literature. Hence for refereed papers such an agreement is completely out of the question. So if BioMed Central is not intended for authors to deposit either their unrefereed preprints or their refereed reprints, what IS it intended for? Could it be a rival new "megajournal," trying to compete for papers with the established journals? In that case, authors, in the interest of their careers and the certification of their research, are better advised to stuck with the refereed journals for now. Only if the established journals continue to oppose online public self-archiving does it make sense to consider transferring our research to new journals that do not. In and of itself, submitting one's work to a new journal rather than an established one is a risky strategy. Established journals have reputations, known quality-control standards, and established impact factors. New journals do not. Here is a conjecture: PubMed Central (the NIH Archive) has a prominent weakness, as currently implemented. It only accepts published papers from publishers, not from authors. Perhaps this is what BioMed Central is trying to help authors get around. But what authors want is to keep publishing in their known, established journals, and that THOSE papers should be openly archived publicly, free for all. Only if that should prove impossible (and it will not) should they consider resorting to alternatives. Until further notice, open archiving's objective is to free the current, established refereed journal literature from its publishers' S/L/P access tolls, not from its publishers. Caveat Emptor. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science harnad@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of "Freeing the Refereed Journal Literature Through Online Self-Archiving" is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html