Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

Copyrighted Science

In “Shaking Down Science,” Matt Blaze takes issue with academic copyright policies. This is something I’ve been meaning to write about since Elsevier, a “reputable scientific publisher,” was caught publishing a full line of fake journals.

Matt concludes:

So from now on, I’m adopting my own copyright policies. In a perfect world, I’d simply refuse to publish in IEEE or ACM venues, but that stance is complicated by my obligations to my student co-authors, who need a wide range of publishing options if they are to succeed in their budding careers. So instead, I will no longer serve as a program chair, program committee member, editorial board member, referee or reviewer for any conference or journal that does not make its papers freely available on the web or at least allow authors to do so themselves.

Please join me. If enough scholars refuse their services as volunteer organizers and reviewers, the quality and prestige of these closed publications will diminish and with it their coercive copyright power over the authors of new and innovative research. Or, better yet, they will adapt and once again promote, rather than inhibit, progress.

I already consider copyright as a factor when selecting a venue for my (sparse) academic work. However, there’s always other factors involved in that choice, and I don’t expect them to go away. Like Matt, my world is not perfect, and in particular, I’m on the steering committee of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, and we publish with Springer-Verlag. I regularly raise the copyright question with the board, which has decided to stay with Springer for now [and Springer does allow authors to post final papers].

There’s obviously a need for a business model for the folks who archive and make available the work, but when many webmail providers give away nearly infinite storage and support it with ads, $30 per 200K PDF is way too high for work that was most likely done on a government grant to improve public knowledge.

I’m not sure what the right balance will be for me, but I’d like to raise one issue which I don’t usually see raised. That is, what to do about citing to these journals? I sometimes do security research on my own, or with friends outside the academic establishment. As a non-academic, I don’t have easy access to ACM or IEEE papers. Sometimes, I’ll pick up copies at work, but that’s perhaps not an appropriate use of corporate resources. Other times, I’ll ask the authors or friends for copies. We need to understand what’s been done to avoid re-inventing the wheel.

If our goal is to ensure that scientific work paid for by the public is not handed over to someone who puts it behind a paywall, perhaps the next step is to apply pressure by only reviewing open access journals and conferences? When I first thought about that, I recoiled from the idea. But the process of looking for previous and related work is a process which must be bounded. There’s simply too many published papers out there for anyone to really be aware of all of it, and so everyone limits what they search. In fact, there are already computer security journals, including Phrack and Uninformed, which are high quality work but rarely cited by academics.

So I’m interested. Does being behind a paywall suffice as a reason to not cite work? If you answer, “no, it’s not sufficient,” how much time or money do you think you or I should reasonably spend investigating possibly related work?

Originally published by adam on 10 Mar 2011
Last modified on 10 Mar 2011
Categories:   economics   Legal   science   Uncategorized