Re: [TOS] Quick update on "make scholarly copyright suck less" project

Turns out Princeton's faculty has adopted an open-access policy:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/princeton-u-adopts-open-access-policy

Not sure how this would affect submissions to journals with restrictive copyright policies.  Maybe it would mean no submissions from Princeton faculty. :-)

Jason

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Mel Chua <mel@purdue.edu> wrote:

On 09/30/2011 11:21 AM, Don Davis wrote:

Having to assign copyright to someone else recently felt like a sort
awkward uncomfortable rite of passage in the academic world.

But it *doesn't* have to be a rite of passage. I mean, yeah, the situation sucks and we *do* have to deal with it now, but just "putting up with it" or quietly avoiding the medium of peer-reviewed journals entirely won't make it change. I'd like to make things so that someday my own PhD students won't have to go through that at all. (It may be a very far-off someday. That's okay. We have time.)

What's a list of the better 'open' journals?

So I've looked at this some, and sadly in our field the "good" journals and the OA journals overlap in... zero places, as best as I can tell. (Actually, I couldn't find any OA journals I would want to submit my scholarly work to, but my subfield is engineering education so others may have more pointers.)

The copyright agreements often seem very overwhelming. (I'm thinking of
ACM.)

ACM is actually pretty standard. IEEE is worse, they'll ask for copyright assignment upon *submission* -- not even acceptance! One of the other major publishers in my field, ASEE, has even weirder and loopier and fuzzier copyright stuff... it *is* overwhelming. It also seems like we tend to deal with the overwhelmingness by signing the papers so we can move on with our lives/research instead of getting mired in legal stuff which isn't interesting to us. So major props for taking the time to look at this, Don -- and thank you.

"You're not giving ACM the copyright to the dataset -- just the paper
itself. Research hypotheses are, in general, second order – that is,
they're not simple descriptions of the data (i.e., sample size, gender
distribution). On a public dataset, descriptions (first-order analyses)
are assumed to be public, as well."

It seems to me then (with my limited knowledge and limited copyright
finesse), that making the dataset public before submission may be a way
to guarantee(?) that you and others may continue to evaluate the data.

I think so! Seb Benthall sent me a link to a blogpost from one of his colleagues from Berkeley on exactly this strategy, and then I think I lost the link (or at least can't find it now). Seb, do you remember what I'm talking about?

--Mel
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