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IEEE Refuses to Accept Public-Domain Papers?
- mturmon 15y agoThis is a very interesting post. I did not know that authors who are not with the government had tried to put works in the public domain, that are submitted to IEEE. I didn't know this was possible. I know it certainly is standard policy for government researchers and labs to retain copyright when work is submitted to IEEE (or anywhere). Sometimes publishers say tough words about how this isn't possible, and you have to sign their copyright form, and you're holding up publication of the work. It's BS. The government copyright people will talk sense into them, and retain copyright so that the work can be distributed openly.
- bdonlan 15y agoFederally commissioned works do not 'retain copyright'. They don't have copyright _at all_ (by law). As such, there is no legal basis for restricting copying of such works. Of course, this includes the IEEE - they can republish all they want, they just can't stop anyone else from republishing, because the copyright never existed in the first place.
- mturmon 15y agoI produce work as part of an FFRDC. The lawyer-derived boilerplate I must put on my work says (in part) "Copyright 2011". But, it's OK to republish the work in any way, including as part of a public web site or government report. I interpreted this as meaning that the government retains copyright, but that may be the wrong legal phrasing. The point is that the work is freely available.
- thyrsus 15y agoLawyers can make mistakes, however, it might have to do with non-U.S. rights or the rights of incorporated material: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Copyright_sta...
- mturmon 15y agoThanks, this clears it up. The discrepancy is that I'm a researcher at a national lab, but not an employee of the US government. There are lots of such people. Thus, copyright does seem to apply to work done by me. I know from experience that the publication people at my lab will arm-twist to ensure copyright is not retained by an external publisher, like Springer or IEEE, and that the work remains openly available.
- MostAwesomeDude 15y agoRegarding attempts to put things in the public domain, it is widely held that, at least in the USA, there are two possibilities. The first is that you can declare something to be in the public domain and put it into the public domain. The second is that declaring something to be in the public domain (even without an affadavit) forms a reliable estoppel in case the author wants to exercise his copyright later. The end result is that, either way, public domain dedications are seen by most people as legally reliable.
- derleth 15y agoI'm beginning to doubt the "IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager" has the authority to do what he's doing, and I'm beginning to think this will blow over with an official response from the IEEE saying as much and rescinding this joker's fake 'policy'.
- guelo 15y agoWhat would be the "IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager"'s incentive to act in this manner if not under official order from IEEE to minimize the amount of public domain content?
- burgerbrain 15y agoNot everyone acts rationally you know. He could just be an idiot...
- Natsu 15y agoSomehow, that reminds me of the IEEE-USA amicus brief on software patents: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20090922030639824 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20090922030639...
- Confusion 15y agoThis page has been up for years.
- derleth 15y agoWell, that does tend to refute my point if the IEEE's stance hasn't changed in the interim.
- mitultiwari 15y agoThis is disappointing. It has been hard to find the soft copy of IEEE papers. Now it will be even harder. IEEE is losing it's value among CS people. Good that most of CS papers are published in ACM conferences, and most of the authors publish a soft copy on their homepages. Also, more and more CS people are posting their papers on arxiv.org.
- chx 15y agoThis is ancient (Last-Modified: Mon, 21 Nov 2005), everyone knows this already, why was it posted suddenly?
- metafour 15y agoHow are you determining the date? The page itself has no date which I think is unhelpful and I was going to ask if anyone knew when this was posted.
- jmillikin 15y agoIt's in the HTTP headers. Some browsers (such as Firefox) show it in a "page info" dialog.
- kragen 15y agoAll browsers except Chrome, in my experience.
- pyre 15y ago# curl -I http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: publicfile Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:52:17 GMT Last-Modified: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 04:40:39 GMT Content-Type: text/html Transfer-Encoding: chunked
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nknight 15y agoI certainly wasn't aware of it. On what grounds do you assert that "everyone" knows it? Age of information is not a reliable predictor of its spread.
- seclorum 15y agoOnce again, please stop assuming that 'old news' isn't still 'news' to someone. If you were a teenager in 2005, and have since published papers during your continued education, then this news is highly relevant and worthwhile to the discussion of copyright of said works. Not everyone is old and weary. There are plenty of students in the world who need to learn about these things, and every year a new wave comes. So, that is why re-hashing 'old news' is very important in our tech world today.
- PaddleSlapper 15y agoThough news to me, be aware this is old news - page published 21 November 2005. Has anything changed since then?
- doctoboggan 15y agoIt will take reputable referees from some journal to volunteer their time to judge papers submitted in the public domain.
- fmota 15y agoThey volunteer their time anyway. They might as well do so for open access journals.
- ajays 15y agoThis is why I canceled my membership in IEEE (and ACM). I believe these organizations have gone beyond their stated purpose, and now exist purely to sustain themselves and their monopolies on conferences. If we just started boycotting them, they'd crumble in no time.
- sliverstorm 15y agoIf we just started boycotting them, they'd crumble in no time. Would that be a good thing? I haven't seen much evidence that IEEE is a no-good parasite. It's a huge leap to go from "gone beyond their stated purpose" and "exist purely to sustain themselves". Don't forget- the last time your computer performed a floating point op, you benefited from the existence of IEEE (IEEE 754). The last time you used a network adapter, you benefited from the IEEE (IEEE 802.3 & 802.11), and I'm guessing it hasn't been long since you last used said adapter.
- irahul 15y ago> Don't forget- the last time your computer performed a floating point op, you benefited from the existence of IEEE (IEEE 754) >The last time you used a network adapter, you benefited from the IEEE (IEEE 802.3 & 802.11), All IEEE is doing here is acting as a standardization committee. IEEE didn't invent floating points or ethernet adapters. Not everything is standardized by IEEE(in fact very little, if you are talking computers), and stuff will work fine if IEEE is vaporized today. IEEE didn't invent anything, new stuff will keep getting invented, and if need be, some other label will be stuck on them.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sliverstorm 15y agoI know they didn't invent them, but standards are a good thing.
- greyfade 15y ago
- ggchappell 15y agoThis is, I think, misleading. There is nothing unusual about IEEE copyright policies. Requiring copyright assignment is standard procedure for academic journals, with exceptions made for U.S. govt. works. As noted in the last paragraph, the American Mathematical Society bucks the trend (they "suggest", rather than require, copyright assignment), but they are a rarity. Other than that, we have one person (the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager) who misunderstands the law and does not behave in a very friendly manner. The above do not strike me as sufficient reasons for singling out the IEEE for blacklisting. If you want, blacklist everyone who puts publicly funded research behind paywalls. Or blacklist no one. But just the IEEE? That doesn't make sense.
- wnight 15y agoBlacklist anyone who stands up for an exploitative policy. If the others wise up soon enough they may never get called on it.
- loup-vaillant 15y agoIn other words, hit the nail that stands out. This feels a bit totalitarian, but it might just work.
- wnight 15y agoYou need to know why "they" are doing "it". But yeah, if "it" is something "they" can afford to stop, then yes. IEEE is famous enough it would survive even if this was a small market negative. It's more problematic with low-end products made by child labor for instance. If they couldn't compete with other child-labor products they'd go out of business. There you need to do a more comprehensive blacklist or you're just swapping the devil you know for the ones you don't.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- kragen 15y agoI believe Dan is blacklisting just the IEEE because no other publisher has yet refused to publish a paper of his on the grounds that it was in the public domain. I don't know how many publishers he has submitted public-domain papers to, but I imagine it's more than two.
- SeanLuke 15y agoIt's obvious that IEEE wouldn't accept such papers. Like any publisher, its business model is based on ownership of copyright. So this is a bit of a tempest in a teacup. Instead, let me offer a more interesting factoid: to the best of my knowledge, in the United States, and probably in certain other countries, there is no such concept as a private individual dedicating a publication to the public domain. Documents fall in public domain when the owners' copyrights have expired. For the federal government, the expiration is immediate. For everyone else, there is no legal mechanism for hastening a document's copyright expiration. [This is why it's foolish to "put software in the public domain". You haven't actually done anything at all.]
- dsl 15y agoI'm not sure how a "factoid" can be prefixed with "to the best of my knowledge," but here is some cold hard fact for you: A work can enter the public domain via expiration or forfeiture. EDIT: A bit of clarification. Some people get confused because copyright actually affords you two different sets of rights: Economic rights, which everyone is pretty much on the same page about (once your work is in the public domain you can't charge for it later). You also get moral rights (right to attribution, right to maintain the integrity of you work, etc). These rights vary wildly by jurisdiction, but are rarely the ones that get argued when a work is in the public domain.
- kkowalczyk 15y ago1. re: Public Domain Let's see: a) random person on the internet (SeanLuke) says you can't dedicate your work to Public Domain b) Creative Commons, which has a staff of lawyers, including very prominent and respected Lawrance Lessig: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Public_domain http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Public_domain, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain 2. re: "obviousness". There's nothing "obvious" about IEEE's greed. The stated goal of IEEE is http://www.ieee.org/about/index.html http://www.ieee.org/about/index.html: "IEEE is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. IEEE and its members inspire a global community through IEEE's highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities." The "obvious" thing, consistent with their stated mission would be to try to disseminate useful information to the largest number of people, like, say, Wikipedia or Khan Academy. It's sad and shameful that they put profits above "advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity".
- drats 15y agoSo no papers from Princeton?[1] [1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3046651 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3046651
- frazerb 15y agoI just struggle to understand how IEEE's publication policy contributes to "advancing technological innovation [..] for the benefit of humanity". IEEE publication policy is nothing but a barrier to innovation. Shame WikiLeaks / anonymous / whoever couldn't help us all out here.
- michael_dorfman 15y agoThe ACM recently published an editorial in the CACM explaining the reasons behind this policy. Here is a brief excerpt: By owning exclusive publication rights to articles, ACM is able to develop salable publication products that sustain its top-quality publishing programs and services; ensure access to organized collections by current and future generations of readers; and invest continuously in new titles and in services like referrer-linking, profiling, and metrics, which serve the community. Furthermore, it allows ACM to efficiently clear rights for the creation, dissemination, and translation of collections of articles that benefit the computing community that would be impossible if individual authors or their heirs had to be contacted for permission. Ownership of copyright allows ACM to pursue cases of plagiarism. The number of these handled has been steadily growing; some 20 cases were handled by ACM in the last year. Having ACM investigate and take action removes this burden from our authors, and ACM is more likely to obtain a satisfactory outcome (for example, having the offending material removed from a repository) than an individual. Personally, I gladly pay money every year to the ACM and the IEEE, as I feel I get excellent value for it. I don't begrudge them their business model, and I don't think there is anything particularly nefarious about their copyright policy (which explicitly allows authors to post freely available copies of their articles for non-commercial purposes.)
- maurits 15y agoSorry, but I couldn't disagree more. Quality comes from the authors and the volunteers who peer review submissions, not from copyright Plagiarism, or detection of (academic) plagiarism has very little to do with copyright. Academics has it own set of instruments to prove that somebody lifted an idea or result with out attribution and to deal with said situation, and they all do not need any copyright rule.
- michael_dorfman 15y agoQuality comes from the authors and the volunteers who peer review submissions, not from copyright This is true. But that does not mean that the publisher provides minimal value; it's worth remembering that Knuth lobbied hard to get the Journal of Algorithms moved from Elsevier to the ACM (where it became TALG) due to issues of copyright and pricing. The ACM (and IEEE) are miles above the commercial publishers in this regard. Plagiarism, or detection of (academic) plagiarism has very little to do with copyright. The ACM says otherwise, and they are the ones who are actually pursuing cases. I tend to take their word for it.
- X4 15y agoSeriously can you please answer me, why someone who is so smart to have a Dr. degree or other title would be willing to work for free, or even pay for it?? I really don't understand it, what is special about IEEE. Why do Scientists send their papers or findings to IEEE etc. instead of just publishing it? Seriously, can someone please give me an insightfull answer to this? If you answer with, nobody has been able to to code system x, that makes IEEE so special and unique, then it's not valid point I think. Because there are enough developers who could pull out a P2P Scientific Document store in a matter of days. Heck, if someone writes text that he think is valuable and is willing to share it with the public domain, why doesn't he just upload it to say: P2P Networks, Cloudstorages or anything else that helps in this matter?
- noneTheHacker 15y ago> Seriously can you please answer me, why someone who is so smart to have a Dr. degree or other title would be willing to work for free, or even pay for it?? I think this video will answer that question for you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc I don't have an answer to the rest of your questions but I think that video will answer your first question pretty well.
- abrahamsen 15y agoThe majority of university research depends on external funding. In order to get funding, you as many published papers in high ranking journals. You get zero credit for self-published papers, or papers in non-ranked journals. So a researchers will always look after the highest ranked journal that is likely to publish a particular result. Issues of copyright get no regard and accessibility gets very little. Copyright ownership won't get you funding. Accessibility might get you more citations (which also affects ranking), but most citations come from other University researchers, who have access anyway through their libraries.
- scott_s 15y agoWhy do Scientists send their papers or findings to IEEE etc. instead of just publishing it? Research is only taken seriously if it's published in a respected, peer-reviewed venue. For some fields in CS, this is mostly ACM and IEEE conferences. The more theoretical sides of CS tend towards the journals.
- desaiguddu 15y agoI applied this logic.. ! My Original paper is with IEEE copyright. But I made that Paper public on my blog with IEEE copyright. http://dndcaptcha.blogspot.com/2010/04/textareaid.html http://dndcaptcha.blogspot.com/2010/04/textareaid.html If a person wants to buy a paper he can buy from IEEE, but a person just want to refer the paper with all details he can freely do so from my Blog website. I don't know whether its a right approach or not? But I didn't wanted my research to just sit in some Publishers Library. If we publish more work in public , we get more people involve in to those research work. :)
- nickcobb 15y agoThis was published 5 years ago?