The relationship between scientific researchers and scientific publishers has long been governed by its own idiosyncratic and formal rules. Peer-reviewed journals act as an arbiter of scientific credibility, even though each tends to have a small subscription base. And thanks to their must-read status among researchers and university faculty, they are able to charge high fees. For instance, a year's subscription to Brain Research costs $22,000.
But the Internet, itself a creation of scientific minds, doesn't discriminate-and it is now shaking up this staid corner of the content world. This year there has been a string of copyright controversies in scientific publishing over how to move to the digital arena without shattering traditional hierarchies. One of the most recent battles-emerging in March-is between the journal Physical Review Letters (PRL) and a group of physicists, led by Jonathan Oppenheim at the University of Cambridge. The journal had accepted two articles by the group for publication. The physicists asked for a new license because they wanted to publish some of the figures and charts from their work on Wikipedia, and the license they were offered would not permit this. The journal, run by the American Physical Society, reacted by rejecting the request and telling the scientists they would no longer publish the articles.
"PRL might be concerned about their ability to recoup their costs," says Oppenheim. However, in this case "giving authors more rights is not going to have any significant impact on their finances," he says. "It is extremely unlikely that a library is going to cancel their subscription to PRL because parts of some articles are on Wikipedia."
"The big picture is how business models evolve and adapt," says David Hoole, head of brand marketing and licensing for Nature Publishing Group, which publishes such journals as the American Journal of Hypertension and Modern Pathology, along with its flagship, Nature. "Recent events indicate that authors are on the move," says Hoole. "Conciliatory voices talk about a balance of rights. But at this point it's still unclear what that balance might be, and whether there may be unintended consequences."
Earlier this year both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Harvard University Faculty of Arts & Sciences made controversial copyright moves that threaten traditional publishers. Starting in April, all researchers who receive grants from the NIH will need to submit an electronic copy of their work within 12 months of the original publication so that the agency can put it into an open electronic database. Michael Carroll, a professor at the Villanova University School of Law who closely follows this issue, says that the new policy will affect 80,000 articles per year and will mean that authors "can not sign any agreement that doesn't at least allow NIH to put it up."
At Harvard, the university library announced it would like to post electronic versions of faculty work. In a motion that garnered enormous attention in the scientific field, the influential members of Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences unanimously voted in February to deposit their articles in this open-access repository and presumably not enter into any copyright agreements that would prevent this. (However, Harvard faculty can seek opt-out waivers.)
For the most part, the dialogue between publishers and scientists has been respectful. But in March the American Chemical Society claimed proprietary ownership over published Chemical Abstracts Service numbers. The claim of copyright over this information-the phone numbers of the chemistry world that identify chemical compounds, polymers, biological sequences, mixtures, and alloys-caused spontaneous combustion among chemists who feared a huge setback in scientific progress. Over the past weeks, angry chemists have tried to organize and reclassify their entire identification system.
It's only a matter of time, law professor Carroll believes, before scientific journals loosen their copyright demands under pressure from authors. "We have a systemic problem which is kind of absurd," he says. "Copyrights get created at universities, flow out of universities, and publishers sell back to universities these very same copyrighted works." The American Physical Society has already said that it will look at its copyright policy at a meeting in May. And where scientists today are demanding more rights, professors of literature and history are likely to soon follow. Says Carroll: "Science is just the leading edge."
