Whose Copy? Whose Rights?

This is the third installment in a series of editorials on the implications of open-access publishing for established publishing practices and stakeholders in scientifi c and medical research. T he questions, tensions, and social concerns surrounding copyright and the Internet are very different for scientifi c and medical literature than for other kinds of easily reproducible digital works. Peer-reviewed publications are often the sole tangible products of the tremendously time-consuming and expensive process of conducting primary research in biology and medicine. Who should own the primary research articles that are the culmination of years of work by scientists and staggering fi nancial investments by governments, universities, and tax-exempt foundations? What uses should the documents' owners permit? In practice, academic authors typically assign full copyrights to their articles to the publishers of the journals in which the works appear. Scientists do not benefi t fi nancially from the transaction; indeed, they often subsidize the cost of their articles' publication in the form of page charges, color charges, and other fees levied by publishers. The prestige associated with publishing in a selective journal is suffi ciently valuable that scientists are generally willing to abdicate the legal rights to their own work without remuneration. In recent years, however, several technological and legal innovations have led a growing number of scientists to begin to question the sagacity of this arrangement. The advent of electronic publishing and the Internet itself have made technically possible a slew of novel uses of primary research papers. Simultaneously, the traditional " all rights reserved " copyright license has been supplemented by a variety of alternative licenses—of equal legal validity and available at no charge to anyone who wants them—that allow copyright holders to prevent some uses of a work without permission, but to authorize others. Different licenses created by the nonprofi t organization Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org), for example, allow copyright holders to mark their work with freedoms—to permit a work's reproduction for any noncommercial purpose (the Noncommercial License) or for any purpose at all provided that the original authorship is properly attributed (the Attribution License). The upshot of these developments is that copyright holders can now permit a spectrum of uses of a paper by prospective researchers, anthologizers, archivists, teachers, patients, policy makers, journalists, and other interested parties. Precisely which uses are permitted and which are not is far from a trivial matter. The particular copyright license under which …