Copyright Advocacy Group Violates Copyright

word munger writes "Commercial scholarly publishers are beginning to get afraid of the open access movement. They've hired a high-priced consultant to help them sway public opinion in favor of copyright restrictions on taxpayer-funded research. Funny thing is, their own website contains several copyright violations. It seems they pulled their images directly from the Getty Images website — watermarks and all — without paying for their use."

0wned

[c0d3h4x0r]

Nelson says: "Haaah-haaaaah!"

Re:

[fbjon]

That is a photograph of a researcher listening to RIAA backed music without paying a royalty.

I don't think he's listening to any music, did you see the computer in the background, behind the microscope? I remember playing Crystal Caves on something that looked like that.

didn't we already pay?

[Spacepup]

From the article:
"They want to restrict access to publicly-funded research results by requiring that everyone pay a fee to see it."

If the research is funded by the public, didn't we already pay to see it?

Re:didn't we already pay?

[pembo13]

I'm sure they would simply say no, and come up with a rationale after.

Re:didn't we already pay?

[mce]

It's not even hard to do so. A lot the publicly funded research builds on non-publicly funded work that has previously been done at the same place or that is being done in parallel with the publicly funded stuff in that very same place. It's not like you can always carve out a complete research item and work on it independently of prior knowledge or of any additional non-public funding.

I've worked in research for many years, and we always had a combination of public and private/corporate funding ongoing for just about anything we did. In fact, doing so was a necessity, as there was no way we could have built and sustained the critical mass needed to be able to even qualify for most public funding if we had been using only public money. In fact, on most programs we got a maximum of 50% public funds. We had to put part of our results in the open in return by publishing, or by providing free licenses to certain parties (who needn't always be a member of the research program). But our work always included material and IP that was privately funded as well. Because of all this, we actually developed a model in which we even gave access to some of the privately funded bits developed with money from company X to company Y (and vice versa) or even to "the public". But it goes without saying that no company X or Y would have funded us if we'd have applied that model to everything we did, just because someone in our lab who was "working on the same big picture" had a public fellowship or was working within the scope of a governmental project.

Re:didn't we already pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, too bad for you and your company. Don't expect to take public money and turn it into to your own corporate profits.

End of story. Spare me the "but some was private and some was...", blah, blah, blah, crap. Your company held out its greedy little hands to take OUR tax dollars. Any knowledge gained from public money must be given back to the public. Period. No jumping through hoops or other fancy legal crap to keep from returning the publics ROI. We want our dollars back with interest or with gained public knowledge.

Re:didn't we already pay?

[mce]

My (previous) employer is a non-profit organisation, created by and partially funded by the local government. They get more than just public results out of the place, they also get jobs (1500 at the place where I worked and a lot more in companies created and/or attracted by us). Not to mention millions of foreign high-tech investment from all the big names in our industry, which is good for the economy. Not to mention also the fact that we publish over 1000 research papers each year, so you can earn your dollars using results that our government and partners paid Euro's for. I.e.: it wasn't even your tax money in the first place!

And since we were non-profit...

Re:

[Paul Fernhout]

"And since we were non-profit..."

So what does that prove? Lots of "non profits" use predatory practices or exist to serve self-dealing boards or employees; many for-profits have laudable business practices and goals (Google to an extent).

Why not have half as many jobs doing truly free work as twice as many whose intellectual labor ends up bound in chains? Doesn't it matter to you that you likely can't ever touch stuff you worked on there anymore -- given that public dollars (your taxes) were consumed to mak

Re:

[mce]

If you read my post again, you'll see that a lot of what that organisation does is put out for public use. Actually, the public gets more than it paid for (also considering that local tax money of a very small region in Europe is going into world-class results). But the public is not the only source of funding and the other parties also need to get what they paid for. There is no fundamantal difference between tax money and "ordinary" money: in both cases the previous owner wants to get something in return.

Re:

[Paul Fernhout]

Nothing was meant to suggest your particular non-profit was in any way unethical; just that the term "non-profit" doesn't mean much anymore. The only really formal definition of "non-profit" or "not for profit" is a corporation whose profits are not given to owners (like the board) -- the profits are just spent in other ways -- given to employees as salaries or to users in terms of lower fees or invested in new ventures or given to other non-profits (or sometimes unrelated individuals).

Top lawyers are now b

Re:

[Paul Fernhout]

Thanks for the interesting reply.

You might like this link, which relates abstractly to what you said:
http://t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm [t0.or.at]
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot

Re:

[RAMMS+EIN]

Care to tell me what place that is, and why you don't work there anymore?

Re:

[mce]

The place is IMEC in Belgium. The reasons why I left are in part personal, so I don't want to explain the details here.

Re:

[Pragmatix]

they also get jobs (1500 at the place where I worked and a lot more in companies created and/or attracted by us)

I wonder how many jobs there would have been if the government hadn't taxed that money in the first place? I find it funny people think that somehow the government can magically make the economy better by taking money from the citizens and then redistributing it in whatever inefficient manner it sees fit.

It reminds me of a story I heard on NPR about some dying town in New Jersey. Some of the e

Re:

[homer_s]

I wonder how many jobs there would have been if the government hadn't taxed that money in the first place? I find it funny people think that somehow the government can magically make the economy better by taking money from the citizens and then redistributing it in whatever inefficient manner it sees fit.

That is insane - you are considering the cost! Like an economist even!
We the taxpayers do not care about the cost - we want our govt to feed us, clothe us, wipe our arses and "create jobs".

The nex

Re:didn't we already pay?

[kebes]

Sure, publicly-funded research builds on privately-funded research, and vice versa. Sure, labs will sometimes receive a mixture of funding, receiving university funds (which derive from tuition), government funds (which derive from taxes), and corporate money (which derive from economic activity). But, you're mixing up the "corporate funding" with "corporate publishers." The two groups are totally distinct.

The public should be outraged that their money is used to fund research that is then restricted from them. The corporate sponsors should also be outraged, for they too have to pay the publishers for access to research which they already funded!

Why should the researchers agree to surrender control of the information to a publisher, who uses it to turn a profit, rather than distribute the information openly? The open distribution suits the needs of the academics much better: it is better for science because the information is freely available to be analyzed, improved, and built upon. It is also better from a career standpoint, because free dissemination increases one's citations and reputation.*

The fact that science receives a mixture of corporate and public funding changes nothing. In the current system, *everyone* has to pay for access to information. Even the people who funded the work or did the work have to pay for access, whether they are a university, a corporation, or the public. Something is very wrong with that antiquated system.

(*Note: Open access is better for the career of an academic if all other things are equal. The main roadblock to open-access is that scientists feel pressure to publish in "high impact" journals, which are the older, more established journals. Thus at present there is a conflict between the desire to publish openly, and the desire to publish in high-repute journals. Luckily the landscape is changing, with more journals moving towards open policies, and newer open access journals gaining reputation quickly.)

Re:

[marcello_dl]

> A lot the publicly funded research builds on non-publicly funded work that has previously been done at the same place or that is being done in parallel with the publicly funded stuff in that very same place. It's not like you can always carve out a complete research item and work on it independently of prior knowledge or of any additional non-public funding.

Sure, but no private research is ever done on completely sandboxed environment either. Many places in the world have publicly funded universities.

Re:

[mce]

First of all, all patents expire. In the original US law (by Jefferson, IIRC, but I could be mistaken in that) after 13 years, which was recently proven to be the optimal duration for the overall benefit of all. Nowadays it takes longer, but expire they still do.

Next, patents are only one solution within the realm of IP protection. That they are not optimal for any problem at hand is something everybody who is actually involved understands, including those who might apply for them and those who have to

Re:

[Metasquares]

It's not really a grant if you impose intellectual property stipulations. Then it's more of a work-for-hire. Anyway, the problem isn't the government; it's the publishers. I think that left to their own devices, most researchers would prefer that their content be freely accessible (my own stance is that anyone who truly wants to advance knowledge has a duty to make their results as accessible as possible), but publishers typically demand copyright of the work, which is insane in itself, as the publishers ha

Re:

[budgenator]

well we paid for the research done by the under-grads who did the real work, but the one guy who sat on his fat butt with 3 letters after his name wasn't paid for.

In many labs

[benhocking]

The undergrads aren't paid at all, and in almost all labs part of that money is going to "the one guy who sat on his fat butt with 3 letters after his name". Incidentally, in our lab, some undergrads are paid and other undergrads do work for research/thesis credits. The guy with the 3 letters after his name does an awful lot of work himself. All joking aside, I'm pretty sure that's the norm.

Re:

[budgenator]

My comments were meant to be tongue in cheek, but I would think that for an under-grad that wants to go into the "business" the experience and a bit of chump change for beer would be worth quite a bit.

Re:

[mce]

Nope. The guy with the 3 letters was the one who was paid. Here's how it works: some public body says: "OK, we'll fund you to to this work under these and these conditions. You'll get 3 person-years of funding spread out over 1.5 years." The lab internally then says: "Well, who are our most expensive people that we can allocate to this project, if need be only for 10% of their time?" Provided that these prople are not yet funded elsewhere and can credibly be claimed to work on the project, be it for doing t

Re:didn't we already pay?

[stefanlasiewski]

If the research is funded by the public, didn't we already pay to see it?

Ah, but you didn't pay for the results. Results costs extra. Good results cost even more.

Re:didn't we already pay?

[MyLongNickName]

Ah, but you didn't pay for the results. Results costs extra. Good results cost even more

But dumb looks are still free.

Re:

[mdielmann]

And we're currently investigating methods to charge for dumb looks. There are unfathomable amounts of profit to be had there.

Re:

[Stooshie]

... Results costs extra. Good results cost even more ...

... and the results the government wants cost more again.

Re:didn't we already pay?

[Coppit]

That's the point of view that I have. I'm lucky enough to be at an institution with rather liberal IP rules (William and Mary). Larger institutions have patent foundations, which are fundamentally against the whole point of research since the patent foundation wants/claims ownership of things you discover, and would rather you didn't publish it.

Happily, I haven't had a problem inserting "release code as open source" as a bullet in all my grant proposals. Since the grant proposal is a contract of sorts, I can point to the proposal (that the institution signed off on) if any lawyer starts hassling me about disclosing patentable discoveries.

Note to all you folks in grad school: put everything you can, including printouts of your code, as appendices in your thesis. Your thesis is copyright you, so the institution can't keep your work (in the thesis) as their own.

Re:

[drew]

You know, in order to get a patent, you have to publish. It's kind of the whole point.

Re:

[Coppit]

But as soon as you publish a clock starts for how long before a patent can no longer be filed. And in cases where a trade secret is more appropriate than a patent, the school would rather you didn't publish. Ditto for copyrightable stuff like software. But basically you're right... The patent foundation wants scientists to self-disclose (before or after publication) primarily because they need help identifying things what could become cash cows for the school.

Re:

[Coppit]

Here the students own everything they make as part of coursework. Can you imagine a school asserting that a painting created in art class belongs to the school?

Re:

[Ioldanach]

From the article: "They want to restrict access to publicly-funded research results by requiring that everyone pay a fee to see it."

If the research is funded by the public, didn't we already pay to see it?

Ok, just show me where to enter my taxpayer ID number to prove that I've paid for the research already.

Re:You didn't pay for peer review

[kebes]

Journals provide peer review. This is not paid for by govt. grant money.

Actually a substantial amount of that peer review is funded by government grants. The reviewers are not paid. They are volunteers, with their salaries coming from the usual sources. In most countries university professors (and obviously employees of government-funded research institutes) get most of their research funds from government grants. (Additional funding may come from the university or from corporate collaborators.)

The journal subscription fees, which fund the editorial staff and so forth, are paid by libraries at universities and government labs (which, again, receive money from university funds and/or government grants). So, again, a good fraction of the costs are being covered by public funds. The scientific journals could not continue operating without the money coming from public sources, so the question remains: why does the public have to pay to read material that they have already funded in other ways?

Do you really want to go to a govt. database with tons of unreviewed research and try to figure out what is good and what is bs?

You misunderstand the intentions of the open-access movement. Scientists are not asking for peer review to be eliminated. Quite the opposite: having the information more open can only enhance the amount of open criticism and discussion of science. The intention is to have journals continue to rely on volunteer reviewers, and to cover journal editorial costs using publication fees instead of subscription fees. So, instead of the public paying to read the final article, the authors would pay a charge when they are publishing, and the results become freely available.

In the end, this changes very little from the financial perspective of the scientific institutes. If journals switched to open access, then institutes would pay publication charges instead of subscription charges. The net effect would be the same for them. The upshot is that the public, and smaller research labs, have better access to scientific knowledge. In no case is peer review removed from the process.

In fact, take note that many high-impact open-access journals are starting to appear (most notably the publications of the Public Library of Science [plos.org]). These new journals are maintaining the rigor of the peer-reviewed scientific process.

In the end, the Journals and publishers still make money under an open access paradigm. So why do they resist it? The usual reasons: they fear change, they fear competition, and they may make less money than they are currently used to. But science will continue.

Re:

[kalidasa]

Absolutely: open access does NOT have to mean the end of peer review!

Re:

[sholden]

Why would you post AC because you do peer review? It doesn't mean you have to have a secret identity, I've reviewed too why would that make me be anonymous everywhere I go?

Re:

[Lonewolf666]

I second that. It seems that GP is doing everyone else in the process a favor by working for free. If he criticizes the system and his publisher is pissed about it, what can they do?

Re:

[rtb61]

What is amazing when it comes to public funded research is somehow the greedy non-contributing publishers like to put across the message that somehow paying for their profit margins some how costs us less than paying taxes that pays for the original research and yes that is the point of open research to get rid of the wasteful parasites who contribute nothing, and slow down everything whilst they argue over whose is whose and whilst pretending that somehow it costs us nothing. Government funded research has

May I be the first to say..

[thatskinnyguy]

they totally got pwn'd on this one.

Honor among thieves?

[tepples]

Do you think Getty Images is going to go after lobbyists who are trying to get more draconian copyright laws written? They may not have any direct relations, but they will at least be sympathetic to each other.

Honor among thieves? Hardly. That's why one music publisher sues another music publisher [wikipedia.org].

Go for it!

[posterlogo]

Oh, and by the way, make sure you cut a check to every taxpayer who funded it in the first place...

The only silver lining......

[budword]

The only silver lining on people like this is that they, like the nazis, are too stupid to prevail in the long run. (Did I set a record for Godwins Law ?)

Godwin's Law

[Enderandrew]

Godwin's Law means you lose the argument, so why intentionally try to invoke it unless it is an underhanded move to make their argument look better by any means necessary?

The only way you could defend this hypocrisy is to poorly argue against it, and invoke Godwin's Law.

Re:

[micpp]

Godwin's Law means you lose the argument

Not necessarily. As originally formulated it read "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one". The idea of this meaning someone loses the argument was a later addition and not part of the original law. It's "law" as in science rather than "law" as in rules.

How Do You Know??!!

[Anonymous Coward]

How do the hell do you know for certain that site didn't violate copyright by paying Getty Images for use of the images while still keeping the watermark?

As far as I can see, just the appearance of the watermark isn't a certain indicator that their copyright was being violated at all. Did anybody ask Getty?

I love how slashdot posts some blog entry and states definitely that this was copyright violation. If only they were this hard on people and sites who you know, pirate movies,music and games.

Re:

[QuantumG]

My guess would be that the point of the watermark is to shame people who are copying the image without permission.

Re:How Do You Know??!!

[UserGoogol]

Technically no, but a person who pays for a stock image and then keeps the watermark on is retarded. Thus, either they are hypocritical or they are retarded, and I try to be generous.

Re:

[QuantumG]

Speaking of retarded. What part of this don't you understand.

1. You can look at the images with the watermark on them and choose if you want to buy them.
2. When you buy them you get the images without the watermark and the right to distribute them.

Therefore, if you choose to use the image with the watermark, even though you've paid to use them, then you're an idiot.

Re:

[corsec67]

Not only that, but the Royalty Free licence might only good for the image without the watermark. Since the image with the watermark is a derived image, it may be true that you can't buy a licence for that version at all.

Re:

[Dun Malg]

Maybe they did buy the images and the webmaster has made an error in the HTML. Error - people make them.

When you buy an image from Getty, you download it on to your own computer. You do not simply like to it, brain trust.

Re:

[UserGoogol]

I wasn't thinking along those lines, in part because I don't think there's anything terribly malicious about hypocrisy. They didn't upload those watermarked pictures explicitly so as to screw anyone over, they just did it out of laziness or whatever. Although I suppose it would still be a bit hasty to rule out the possibility that they just screwed up in some particularly silly way.

Re:

[admactanium]

i think the question was not why a watermark would exist...

but just because it still has the watermark does not mean that it was not paid for...

getty doesn't watermark the images that are bought. i'd guess they don't even have high-rez files with watermarks. so you're suggesting that someone paid getty for the rights to an image and rather than download the high-rez non-watermarked file they chose to use the watermarked low-rez preview file? that's completely ridiculous and utter nonsense. nobody would

Re:

[admactanium]

well, you're going to have to tell BBC that they're stupid too.

did you compare that to the actual watermark images in the topic story? no? because that's not a watermark, that's an attribution. they don't make watermarks small and in a corner specifically so they're not easily retouched out. thanks for playing though.

Re:

[admactanium]

knowingly or not, the fact of the matter is people who have worked for Getty Images and with getty images in this topic have already stated that those images are watermarked. i download THOUSANDS of images from getty every year for comp purposes. those look exactly like a getty watermark for comp images. mistakes happen. just like how microsoft had images on one of their own sites that showed people using an aluminum powerbook. nobody is saying for sure that this organization is intentionally breaking a cop

Re:How Do You Know??!!

[VultureMN]

I work at Getty, and while I'm a code monkey and not in the biz side of it, I'm pretty sure we don't sell images w/the watermark still visible. (I've had to write code dealing with our rights-management crap, and I've never seen anything about "keeping the watermark")

Hell, if they just wanted a legit cheap picture, they'd have gone to iStockPhoto. :)

Re:How Do You Know??!!

[admactanium]

I was wondering this myself. I bet it's a lot cheaper to get a license for stock photos that requires you to include the credit watermarked in, instead of being able to use the photos on your own without obvious credits.

no, i buy images from getty quite often, the point of the watermark is to specifically show that the image has not been bought. who in the world would want to use a watermarked image? the extra stupid thing about it is, you can get non-watermarked low-rez getty images simply by registering for an account. that way people like me can make comps with their images without that distracting watermark. so the "designer" who did their site is not only unethical, but quite stupid as well. to top it off, they could have hidden their "borrowing" quite easily by just cropping in tighter than the watermark.

if getty images wanted to support this cause, i'm sure the designer or the organization could have negotiated out a pro-bono deal with them easily. getty commonly supplies non-watermarked high-rez images for their regular customers if you ask. i've downloaded high-rez images from them and even stock footage for project presentations. no designer in their right mind would use a watermarked image like that.

Re:

[bugnuts]

haha, they now added "Copyright: Getty Images" to the page after shopping out the watermarks.

Yeah, that site reeks of amateurism.

Like Billy Joel said...

[WwWonka]

Those in glass houses shouldn't throw someone else's copyrighted stones.

ah yes now I remember

[wizardforce]

just goes to show how stupid copyright law is in its current state. tax payers fund the research, researchers pay to have it submitted/access to journals and then pay again if anyone wants to actually see any of the research that was done. that is utter bs, there isnt a reason for them to charge as much as they do [the university I go to has had to shell out who knows how many thousands for this very reason] hell half the research papers are 20-40 $ unless you get an unlimited account with those crooks.

Springer Slutz

[BillGatesLoveChild]

I'd like to see Universities who let their researchers give away their copyright to private publishers (like Springer) lose their public funding. The fees these private publishers charge are just way too much: usually more than a book, and they didn't even write the stuff.

Like taking someone out on a first date, only to have them hump another diner in the toilet who slips them US$40. Is that Ivy League?

Re:

[Xiaran]

I agree. I'm not in the academic world but Ive often wondered why universities don't leverage the power of the internet. I could imagine many universities around the world forming a web site for research papers. It could be similar to something like this very site, but the moderators and submitters would have to have their identities verified. Imagine if a scientist could submit a paper and instantly have other scientists commenting, pointing out errors or even linking to others work on the same issue/subje

Obligatory.

[Tackhead]

Nothing to see here. Especially that Getty watermark in the hair of that guy in the lab coat in doc_image.jpg. And definitely not the Corbis watermark in the left-hand skull/shoulder X-Ray picture in header.jpg. Or the one that looks like some sort of text on the shoulder (and the hair, and the shelf all the way to his elbow) of the guy in the library in header.jpg that I can't quite make it out yet, but I'm sure someone else on Slashdot will. Umm, I mean, "Move along."

Re:

[Obfuscant]

Or the one that looks like some sort of text on the shoulder (and the hair,

Ummm, if text in the hair means "copyright", who is this "sex" who has the copyright on my Farah Fawcett poster?

The difference is...

[PsychoSlashDot]

that when these transgressions are pointed out to them, they'll probably pay for license to use the images. When Joe Average infringes, most of the time it's deliberate, and he has no intention to pay.

I know I don't have proof to back either of these statements, but I suspect they ring true to those of us willing to be honest about our motivations.

Re:

[FunWithKnives]

Are we overlooking the fact that this is a "high-priced consultant" group, and "Joe Average" is, well, your average Joe? Oh, wait, I'm sorry. I forget sometimes that our government already considers corporations to be legal people. Why should this situation be any different, right?

Surprised?

[Sunburnt]

I notice a lot of comments pointing out, reasonably, that since we the taxpayers have already payed for research, we should not be expected to pay for it again to the benefit of a few businessmen with a special interest.

The concept makes sense...to most of us, at any rate.

The U.S. Government, however, disagrees. [wikipedia.org]

Soap, ballot, jury, ammo.

Let's give them a shout!

[budgenator]

I encourage everyone on slashdot to drop them a note [prismcoalition.org] condemning copyright violations such as the apparent ones that are on the prism website.

web designer

[Gogo0]

So some stupid web designer put some images on the site he was hired to make, that means the whole organization is hypocritical?

Not to defend their movement or anything, but assuming the site wasnt made in-house by an "IP believer", the situation is ironic, not hypocritical.

Re:web designer

[oliphaunt]

Someone still signed off on the site before it went live, meaning at least one marketdroid or PHB decided that it was OK to use those photos without asking where they came from. Unless the operation is totally half-assed. Which I guess is the point.

Re:web designer

[fm6]

Organizations are collectively responsible for their joint actions, even if every single member didn't sign off on the specific action. Suppose Prism persuades the administration of a University that they have to stop their faculty from "stealing IP." If the university seriously want to change its people's behavior, it implements new policies and make it very clear to the faculty that they have to follow them.

In general, that's how organizations respond when they decide they shouldn't be doing something: they tell their people not to do it, and sanction them if they don't listen.

So Prism is going around telling other organizations to implement a policy while failing to implement it themselves. Sounds like hypocrisy to me.

A clumsy attempt to rouse public opinion

[golodh]

I had a look at the website (on behalf of commercial science publishers) in question and I really couldn't care less about those pictures. It's probably fair-use anyway. What did grab my attention is the sneakily dishonest attempts to rouse public sentiment against federal support for alternatives to commercial journals (such as Open Source journals) or even the use of federal money for outright support of such journals, which I'll share with you:

Various initiatives and proposals have been put forth by special interest groups and some legislators that would force private sector publishers to surrender to the federal government all peer-reviewed articles that report on research supported by federal research grants.

Such undue government intervention in scholarly publishing poses inherent risks and problems, including:

(1)undermining the peer review process by compromising the viability of non-profit and commercial journals that manage and fund it

[...]

(4) introducing duplication and inefficiencies that will divert resources that would otherwise be dedicated to research.

I admire the chutzpa of the complaint about "undue government intervention". Research federally funded, peer-review carried out by publicly funded academics, but commercial publishers would first copyright articles sent to them for free, and them charge federal government for those same articles? Measures to ensure that the feds can download and copy those articles for free is "interfering"? Oh boy!

How about some proper negotiation with those publishers about copyrights? How about setting up all-electronic Open Source journals that offer access free of charge, and let commercial publishers compete with the Open Source journals for articles they want to publish? Or is that "compromising the viability" of the commercial offerings?

Yes ... on the subject of "compromising the viability". Joe Sixpack might not recognise this statement for the fallacy it is. Research is carried out (often funded by federal government), and written of for free by the researchers who did it. Peer review of scientific articles is carried out for free by scientists in their field. Those are the "peers" that conduct peer-review. And they are *not* funded by the publishers, the are funded by their respective employers (universities, companies), and by the individual researchers themselves, who will often spend their own time reviewing papers..

Now it's widely known that todays science publishing is big business (commercial science publishers post excellent earnings every year) and scientific journals are terribly expensive (just ask any university library near you).

The fun part is that commercial publishers really do very little for the journals they publish. Just consider:

- the raw material is delivered to them in the electronic format of their choice, free of charge

- they must then employ a qualified editor who does the first crude selection. (This individual will have to be paid be paid a good salary, say $60k - $80k a year.)

- then they send the articles to individual researchers for peer-review. This takes a few hours of secretarial support, a rolodex, and an email account.

- then they read the comments from the peer reviewers that help them decide whether the article is publishable, and they route the comments to the authors for improvement and response

- finally they receive the amended article, in electronic form, do a final check, and have it typeset.

That's all. The little secret is that commercial publishers don't really add that much of value. But a library subscription can easily come to $8,000 - $12,000 per year. How many of them would you need to cover your costs? Publishers don't let on obviously, but a fair guess is that $200,000 annually will be enough to keep a journal running. That would be, say 40 subscriptions of $5

Re:

[king-manic]

I had a look at the website (on behalf of commercial science publishers) in question and I really couldn't care less about those pictures. It's probably fair-use anyway.

photographs and images never have republishing rights as fair use. If you grab anything from a clip art collections or someone else's collected works it needs the appropriate license. Photographers and graphics artists can't make money on support thus require licensing fees to get paid for their work. They take it really seriously because i

Ok, sorry about that

[golodh]

Ok, sorry to be so flippant about those photographs (my ignorance shows here I'm afraid, and I just skipped them while searching for the text). They really look so generic and nondescript that it never crossed my mind that they might have value. But that's not an excuse of course.

On second thought, and when I look closer, I see that they are good-quality photographs that weren't taken as an afterthought with someone's mobile phone. So you're right ... someone had to go and take them, and that someone had

Re:A clumsy attempt to rouse public opinion

[kocsonya]

> I admire the chutzpa of the complaint about "undue government intervention".
> Research federally funded, peer-review carried out by publicly funded academics,
> but commercial publishers would first copyright articles sent to them for free,

FREE? But it is not free! The scientists PAY money to the publisher for an article to be published! It is by no means free. Certain journals make you pay a couple of thousand dollars for publication, plus extra for images plus a lot more extra for colour images. Mind you, as the author of the article you can usually download the PDF form of the article (i.e. the same file you sent them + journal name and page number on the bottom) for free. Forget about a free copy of the journal itself, that's a very much outdated concept - buy the paper, if you want it, like everybody else. You are not the copyright holder, after all.

For what it's worth, some scientific journals put a disclaimer in a footnote on the first page of each article. The footnote states that since the athors of the article paid for the publication of their results, in the legal sense the whole article should be considered as paid advertisement. No kidding.

I know of no journal you have to pay to publish

[golodh]

I'm surprised. I never saw any scientific journal that I had to pay to publish in, and I never saw any scientific journal stating that its contents were "paid advertising".

It might be that it differs by field and by journal (I'm in engineering / maths), and I'm sure that e.g. Nature doesn't demand fees to publish.

Re:

[Sparky McGruff]

You might check out, for example, the The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [pnas.org]. A sample article (the first article from the first issue of 2001) is here [pnas.org]. (New articles require a journal subscription, but archival articles are online). The relevant text, found in the bottom right corner, reads like this:

The publication costs of this article were defrayed in part by page charge payment. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 U.S.C. 1734 solely to indi

Re:

[kocsonya]

Check out IOVS, supposedly the most respected (i.e. loads of real paid ads...) journal in ophthalmic research. Quite a handful of medical and/or biomed research journals make you pay. A lot.

Re:

[kocsonya]

Ah, I forgot: in a grant application budget you can (and should, these days) have an item for "publication cost". I.e., the money you expect to pay for publishing your results.

Re:

[codegen]

It does differ by field. In the Computer Science, Software Engineering fields,
publication is free for academic submissions. For some journals (but not all),
commercial submissions must pay a publication fee. They usually try to entice
the academics to pay a voluntary publication fee by offering extra offprints.
I've never had to pay a publication fee for any of my papers.

Re:

[mpe]

I admire the chutzpa of the complaint about "undue government intervention".

Especially considering that copyright is a creation of government in the first place.

Research is carried out (often funded by federal government), and written of for free by the researchers who did it.

Other posters have said (first hand) that they have to pay to be published. (Possibly even pay to submit an article for publication.

Peer review of scientific articles is carried out for free by scientists in their field.

It wo

Re:

[poot_rootbeer]

It's probably fair-use anyway.

No, probably not. Unless the Getty Image content was presented in an educational or critical context (e.g., "see how this copyright holder has used watermarking to reduce the value of unlicensed copies?"), there is most likely no valid "fair use" exemption which would apply.

Re:

[Miraba]

Hi, I work at a nonprofit scientific publisher [agu.org]. Here's what actually happens:

The paper is submitted.
The journal editor sends it to an associate editor.
The associate editor selects the peer reviewers.
The scientists recommend changes before accepting the paper. These comments go back to the author through the editor. Not requiring changes is extremely rare.
The author makes changes and resubmits the paper. The editor accepts the paper and the author is notified.

The paper now moves in-house.
The col

Scholarly publishing is a moneymaking scam anyway

[bigbigbison]

I'm in the humanities so things may be different in the hard sciences.

In order to get your article published you have to subscribe to the journal and in most cases the society that the produces the journal. When you get published you don't get paid and the publishers take the copyright. Because they take the copyright when you want to revise the paper, turn it into a book, or even pass it out to use in your own class you have to get permission. Now they always give permission but they are under no legal obligation to do so. They own the article outright.
Then the journals turn around and sell access to their articles to a database company like ebsco or someone else. That database company then charges universities for access to those articles.

As academics part of what we get paid for is to publish. So the university pays us to publish and then turns around and has pay someone else to get access to those very same articles that they paid to have written in the first place. Sure they get access to lots of other articles written by people from other universities but the fact is they are paying twice for these articles. I'm sure there are lots of other businesses that wish they had the same business model.

To top it off, as I said earlier, a lot of these journals are the official publications of academic societies. These societies are organized by academics in the field for academics in that field. It is supposed to help with the advancement and promotion of that area of study. So why are they taking the copyrights of their members? Sadly, most academics don't know or care about intellectual property and so the few times I've asked that very question I've been met with "I don't know" or the editor of the journal trying to defend profiting off our backs.

Re:

[codegen]

In the CS field, it is the convention that if the paper is sufficiently different, then
the revision can be published separately. I have been guest editor of three journal
special issues related to conferences. We require that there be at least 30% new material
in the revised papers from the papers in the conference, and the referees for the revised
papers are asked to comment on how different the extended paper is. To the best
of my knowledge it has not been tested in court, but it is the accepted practice.

Something's up

[Kwesadilo]

When I went to the site, I didn't see any watermarks in the images, which indicated to me that the Prism Coalition had fixed the problem, either by acquiring the images through the proper channels or by painstakingly editing the photos.

Then I went to the Google cache [72.14.209.104] of http://www.prismcoalition.org/ [prismcoalition.org]. The bar at the top says that the cache was made on August 23, four days before the blog post from the summary. There are not any watermarks in the Google cache. If the cache is accurate and accurately dated,

Re:

[Shados]

I dont think google caches images, actually. They still pull em from the original server, which can be quite a mess when a server is down and you want more than the text.

May they just linked the wrong images?

[smitth1276]

It's possible that they DID have permission to use those images, and that they simply displayed the watermarked ones by mistake. That's an awfully serious charge you guys are throwing around without evidence.

Re:

[Hittite Creosote]

Then they are blitheringly incompetent. Besides, technically they'd have only paid for the non-watermarked images, not the images with watermarks. Also, I notice that a number have suggested that the current images have been edited with photoshop - open them with a hex editor and see the info, I notice at the moment it comes up as Adobe Photoshop 7.02007:08:27 22:06:26.

Re:

[pimpimpim]

A comment from an ex-getty employee that has been posted later answers this: using the watermarked-images is prohibited. If you pay the license, use the non-watermarked ones. Furthermore, research from commenters on the cognitive daily site seems to indicate that they have used photoshop to remove the watermarks.

In any case, it reeks of amateurism, just the kind of people you trust your money to, isn't it. Also, as a researcher I am offended by the way these people want to mingle in research, saying it is

Re:

[Tsu-na-mi]

Insightful? o_0

The only way to get the watermarked images is to browse their catalog and click "save image" on the sample image. Any image you purchase does not have the watermark on it. They watermark the images in the catalog so people have to properly pay for them or their copyright infringement is blatantly obvious, such as this case.

I would appreciate it if clueless people (people who have never worked in publishing, design, or other fields where one uses stock photos/footage) would refrain from com

Freedom vs Peer Review

[Doc Ruby]

PRISM claims [publishersweekly.com] that free publication of science reports on the Web will undermine peer review.

And now, it's all good....

[mat catastrophe]

Looks like they've bought the images in question. Current front page has great big "copyright xxx" on all three pics. Guess Prism's out a few bucks.... And probably a couple of web designers are out of a job. That's life.

Re:Submitter didn't do their homework

[word munger]

No, royalty-free is different from free. Royalty-free means that you don't have to pay based on the number of uses of the images. It does NOT mean you get it for free.

Re:Submitter didn't do their homework

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked at Getty, and use of watermarked images is prohibited. "Royalty-free" = when you license an RF image, you can use it in any application, for as long as you like, in as many different projects as you like (eg: a printed ad with 1,000,000 copies).

Re:

[unity100]

apparently some bigots have modded your post down again.

its curious though, there are actual people in the world, who PAY for some research through their taxes, and then does not want the ownership of it through public domain.

totally contradicts capitalism. you paid for it, but you dont own it.

Re:Taxpayer research is public domain

[jc42]

[T]here are actual people in the world, who PAY for some research through their taxes, and then does not want the ownership of it through public domain.

I've read quite a number of histories of science in which the authors point out that the Western "scientific revolution" during the last few centuries has nothing to do with discovering "the scientific method". Scientific methods have been independently discovered in nearly all societies, going back into prehistory. One example I ran across recently was the comment that from what we know of their methods, the North American Indians' "medicine men" had better medicine than Europe did until sometime in the 1800s. The reason was that the medicine men actually had better scientific methodology than European doctors did. But then things changed

So what caused the big advances in Western science in the past few centuries? The historians answer to this is simple: open publication. In all other societies, such knowledge has almost always been strictly controlled by small "guilds". The knowledge was secret, and discoveries were usually not even shared with colleagues outside the discoverer's immediate circle of professionals. This meant that everything had to be rediscovered over and over again. You could only learn what your mentors knew, and you could only build on what they passed on to you, because everyone else's knowledge was unavailable to you.

But a few hundred years ago, some researchers in Europe developed a curious new approach: They published their discoveries openly, making them available for others to read, use, and build on. This led to the explosive growth of knowledge that we're familiar with.

In most of the West, such open publication is historically done only by government researchers. Before the 20th century, this meant the few idle rich such as Isaac Newton, who had brains and curiosity. So it took a while to really get going. But in the 1900s, various governments slowly got it through their thick skulls that funding research was one of the things that was building other countries' economies (and militaries), so maybe they should be funding research too. Then things really started ramping up.

But there is still one major drag on scientific advance: A lot of funding still goes into "private" (i.e., corporate) research. This is, scientifically speaking, usually a dead end, because the results of such research is kept private, and as of with the guilds of old, it isn't available for others to build on. The legal system cooperates in this, by prosecuting people who get access to private research results and try to build on it. In recent years, this has been happening more and more in the US, as the corporate world consolidates its control over the government and determines how most research is funded. Some universities also contribute to the problem, by claiming ownership of research results when they can and keeping it secret (or usable only under high license fees). I've read a few predictions that useful American research may be ending now, as the corporate world takes most of it private. And it's curious to see the publishers of scientific journals jumping in to block the advent of cheap open publication via the Internet.

Anyway, at least according to these histories, we should be supporting the open-publication people, because they're the ones pushing for more of what really made Western science the success it has been. If we really want Science to continue to improve our lives, we should be pushing for full access to all research results.

(And people have pointed out that the Internet is an example of the same phenomenon. It hasn't succeeded because it's such a great network. The IP/UDP/TCP/DNS/SMTP/HTTP/... protocols aren't all that good, actually. They're good enough to do the job, but anyone who knows them can tell you lots of ways to improve them. The reason for the Internet's success is mostly that all the specs have been published openly from the start. Anyone can download them for free, read them and implement them without legal restrictions. This gave the Internet a huge advantage over other privately-developed protocols that were often technically better but weren't available to any developer that was curious.)

Re:

[unity100]

well said !!!

But a few hundred years ago, some researchers in Europe developed a curious new approach: They published their discoveries openly, making them available for others to read, use, and build on. This led to the explosive growth of knowledge that we're familiar with.

and the above is most precisely true, as the "sciences" and "nighttime experiments" and publication of these was a pastime for noble or rich or upper middle class gentlemen during late 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. these eras are the time periods at exactly when enlightenment occured, age of reason came forth and great discoveries were made.

at the advent of 20th century, with the industrialization and patent concept becoming something that can be used for making money, withholding in

Re:

[marcosdumay]

"And people have pointed out that the Internet is an example of the same phenomenon. It hasn't succeeded because it's such a great network. The IP/UDP/TCP/DNS/SMTP/HTTP/... protocols aren't all that good, actually. They're good enough to do the job, but anyone who knows them can tell you lots of ways to improve them. The reason for the Internet's success is mostly that all the specs have been published openly from the start. Anyone can download them for free, read them and implement them without legal rest

Re:

[jc42]

Actualy, the reason that the Internet is sucessfull is that there is a complete implementation of the main protocols available (BSD licensed) to anyone that want to use it.

Well, I wouldn't agree that this is the reason. It certainly helped get things rolling. But I'd argue that if the geeks at Berserkeley hadn't done the job, it would have been done by others. And it didn't have to be done at one place. The division of the design into layers and different specialized protocols makes it easy for independe

Re:

[Lord Ender]

(And people have pointed out that the Internet is an example of the same phenomenon. It hasn't succeeded because it's such a great network. The IP/UDP/TCP/DNS/SMTP/HTTP/... protocols aren't all that good, actually. They're good enough to do the job, but anyone who knows them can tell you lots of ways to improve them. The reason for the Internet's success is mostly that all the specs have been published openly from the start. Anyone can download them for free, read them and implement them without legal restrictions. This gave the Internet a huge advantage over other privately-developed protocols that were often technically better but weren't available to any developer that was curious.)

I hereby revoke your parentheses rights.

Re:

[jc42]

So basically, the enlightenment was due to Gutenberg?

No; it didn't have a single cause. Gutenberg certainly made a major contribution and helped to enable the Enlightenment. But his technical advance potentially made publication easier and cheaper for everyone in the world, not just in Europe. The really important advance wasn't in the hardware, but rather in the "software", i.e., in the social structure that developed the concept of open publication of scientific results. This could have been done anyw