Authors' expectations

While journals like Medical History disseminate new knowledge and try to achieve fairness for authors and readers, I think we should all be striving for clarity and transparency.

• People trying to read and cite articles should not have trouble working out what they are looking at, or worrying about whether this version is identical to that version, and so on.
• Authors who have written for MH in the past should feel confident that their rights have been respected and their work is clearly and accurately published (whether in print or online) in the manner they expected at the time of publication.
• Authors considering publication in MH in the future should have clear knowledge of the terms under which their papers will be published.  They should be able to answer these questions quickly and easily:
  
  • Will I have to pay for my article to be published?
  • Will the public have to pay to read my article?
  • Will I own the copyright of my article?
  • Can my article be reproduced, sold or re-sold without my consent or without paying me?

My views on some of the key issues above are laid out briefly in my January 2012 blog post Copyright and Open Access.
I have also tabulated these key issues for a number of journals that publish in my field, in the post Some OA journals that publish on South Asia.
What I discovered while assembling that information is that many journals do not provide clear information on these basic issues.  I think this is most often because the editors are simply ignorant of these matters.  This is not the case with CUP, but it appears to me that their policies err in the other direction, and are over-complex and hard for legally-naive academic authors to understand.  In the case of Medical History it is still the case that the document outlining the journal's policies in this matter contains opacities, if not self-contradictions (see next blog post).  Hopefully these will be ironed out soon.

Medical history: CUP breaching author's copyright? (cont.)

In an earlier post, I said I had written to CUP about two issues relating to an article that I wrote and of which I own the copyright,

1. Their website's assertion that they own the copyright of my article, and 
2. That they are bundling my Open Access article in a commercial package. 

Daniel Pearce, Commissioning Editor, HSS Journals at CUP has now written back a friendly and apologetic email letter, saying among other things,

I can confirm that an error has been made [...] in respect to the XML header files which accompany a subset of Medical History articles.  As a consequence, as you identify, our platform is currently displaying the incorrect copyright line for your article.  This is entirely unintentional.  It has never been our intention, and is not our intention now, to claim copyright over your article or the articles of any author in the same position as you.   To put this right we have requested a re-supply of XML as a priority and hope to be in a position to correct the copyright lines on all relevant articles on the live site today.  Naturally, we would like to issue an unreserved apology to you for this mistake.

I'm relieved about this, and glad that it has been possible to clear things up gracefully.
Mr Pearce will be writing to me again next week about question 2, when the people who know about these issues are back in the office.

Medical history: CUP breaching author's copyright?

(The last blog post on this topic starts with a summary of the saga so far.)

The CUP website for Medical History is now offering digitised back issues of the journal.

Not paid for

If you are just looking at the CUP from your home computer, without paying anything, you see this "Not paid for" screen.  The buttons on the left expand the issues, and you can burrow down to the articles, where you can read the abstracts.  But that's all you can get.  You can't read the actual articles. You can't even buy them.  They're not downloadable (see the previous blog).  There's no link to PMC, where they are legally free.

Paid for

But if you are on a university network that has paid for a license to view CUP content, then you see this, "Paid for" screen.  Now you can download the full PDF of all articles and book reviews back to 2007.
The expression "Digitised Archive" is not explained.

Here's the thing
All the PDF files that are being offered here by CUP are copied directly from the PubMed Central archive of the journal that ran up to 2011, when the journal was still Open Access, and authors still owned the copyright of their articles.  I have checked individual files.  They are the same files, byte-for-byte.  In the image below, you can see the PMC file on the left, and the CUP file on the right.  The date of creation is "6 March 2007" in each case.

The byte sizes are identical too.


Okay.  CUP has copied the free PDFs from PubMed Central to its own website, where it is distributing them for a fee under its bundled licensing scheme for universities.  Is this not wrong?  The PMC copyright notice says clearly:

All of the material available from the PMC site is provided by the respective publishers or authors. Almost all of it is protected by U.S. and/or foreign copyright laws, even though PMC provides free access to it. (See Public Domain Material below, for one exception.) The respective copyright holders retain rights for reproduction, redistribution and reuse. Users of PMC are directly and solely responsible for compliance with copyright restrictions and are expected to adhere to the terms and conditions defined by the copyright holder. Transmission, reproduction, or reuse of protected material, beyond that allowed by the fair use principles of the copyright laws, requires the written permission of the copyright owners. U.S. fair use guidelines are available from the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress.

Copyright breach?
This is an important issue.  The authors of articles in Medical History from 2005-2011 retained copyright of their own work. In the article above, by me, you'll see clearly at the bottom of the page, in the first footnote position, it says "(C) Dominik Wujastyk".  I own the copyright.  Nobody can copy that article without my permission.  Now, I knew that my article would be Open Access and freely downloadable from PMC; that's one of the reasons I wanted to publish with Medical History.  But I did not agree that anybody else could republish or sell my article. And that is what CUP is now doing.  Individuals at home can't buy it, but CUP is implicitly selling my article to universities and other license-holders by including it in their bundled commercial offering.
I do not want that. CUP has not sought my permission, nor offered to negotiate a copyright fee with me.

Copyright theft?
Even worse, CUP has slapped their own copyright statement on my article!  As you can see in the image below, CUP claims copyright for my article, dating from 2007, and says that it was published online in May 2012 (which is untrue, since it appeared online and in print in 2007). 

Just to make it clear that CUP is making money from my copyrighted article, here is the "request permissions" screen.

The popup "I would like to ..." menu offers these choices, that lead to screens where you can pay a fee.
These are all matters for me, as copyright-holder, not for CUP.  If someone wants to reprint my article in a book, or make a Hollywood film from it, I expect to be contacted and, with any luck, offered money for it.
I am writing a letter of complaint to CUP about this breach of my legal rights.

Corollary
The matter is more complicated, for another reason.  When I wrote this article, I had a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow contract with the Wellcome Trust that included the requirement that all my articles should be published under Open Access terms.  This I did.  In some cases, the Wellcome Trust, through UCL, paid substantial sums of money for my articles to appear as Open Access publications.  But now, CUP has asserted that it owns my copyright, and has placed my article in a closed-access publication website. This causes a breach of the terms of my research fellowship contract with the Wellcome Trust, and a clear breach of the intention of the Wellcome Trust to further Open Access publication for the research that it funds.

CUP online article rental

As you can tell, I'm interested in newly-emerging models for the distribution of academic knowledge.

Cambridge University Press sells articles from its journals for about $30 each.  But they have also introduced a "rental" system, whereby they will give you online access to the PDF of an article for 24 hours at a much lower price, typically $5.99.  See here for an example.  A rented article cannot be downloaded, printed or cut-n-pasted (details here).

I have not been able to test this service, because it depends on a java applet, and on my system this does not initialize correctly.  I get a blank screen.  I've tried both Firefox and Chromium.  I'm using a correct and up-to-date version of java,

java version "1.6.0_23"OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.11pre) (6b23~pre11-0ubuntu1.11.10.2)OpenJDK Server VM (build 20.0-b11, mixed mode)

running under Ubuntu, all very standard.  It seems likely that CUP hasn't tested their new rental delivery system widely enough yet.  CUP gives no warnings about any problems, nor any specifications about special systems or computer platforms that may be necessary.  All they say is that you need a browser and internet access.
Caveat emptor.

This is an interesting model, and I think I quite like it.  The abstracts of articles are available freely, so one can get a reasonably good idea of what is likely to be in the article without paying anything.  It would be better to have page one also.  The 24-hour access is interesting because it means you have to decide to read the article just before you rent it.  You have a day and a night to read it.  Sometimes I download an article but then never get round to reading it.  The rental system makes that impossible.  You can't keep it, and your time is running out, so it is likely that you will pay and then read the thing there and then, barring interruptions from your children.

The price, $5.99, is nearly right, but it is still too high.  It is a deterrent price.  It effectively stops you browsing items that might-or-might-not be of interest.  It kills serendipity, which is a crucial element of serious academic research.  A reasonable price would be $3-$4, which in today's economy is a fair price for something that is likely to be only about 20 pages long at the outside, and usually of undetermined value to your research.  Compare with emusic.com charging £0.42-£0.49 for a single track from a CD.

"Medical History" going from free, Open Access, Creative Commons licensed to copyright-controlled closed access

In a controversial move, the journal Medical History is moving from being an "Open Access, no Article Processing Fee" journal to being a closed, copyrighted, fee-charging journal.

1957: the launch

The first issue of Medical History, edited by W. J. Bishop, appeared in 1957 (front matter).  Medical History rapidly established itself as a journal of primary importance in the field of medical history, especially in the anglophone world.  In many ways the evolution of the journal's content from 1957 to the present day is a mirror of the evolution of the field of medical history itself, from the reminiscences of senior physicians to the work of professionalised medical and social historians.  From its earliest issues it included the writings of such figures as Charles Singer, Lynn Thorndike, and Walter Pagel, and over more than half a century Medical History has become a journal of record for its academic field.

At its launch, the journal was printed and published by Dawsons of Pall Mall.  An annual subscription to four issues cost $7.50, or $2.50 for society members.

1960: Wellcome Trust funding

In 1960, just a year before his death, Bishop published a letter to the readers announcing that the Wellcome Trust had made a five-year grant to enable the journal to continue publication.  This grant was an appropriate decision by the Trust, at that time still bound by the terms of Sir Henry Wellcome's Will that included a stipulation that the Trust should support the study of the history of medicine (see, e.g., the first and first and second reports of the Wellcome Trust).

1965: Wellcome Trust ownership

Five years later, when the Wellcome Trust's initial grant came to an end, Dawsons decided no longer to publish the journal, and "surrendered all their rights in the journal."  Its publication was transferred to the Wellcome Historical Medical Library (see here).  Since the WHML was owned and solely funded by the Wellcome Trust, this change effectively institutionalised the Trust's support for Medical History.  That support has enabled the journal to continue publication until last year.

2005-2011: The Open Access years

But the single biggest change in the journal's history came in 2005.  That year, the Wellcome Trust issued a public statement as follows:

Medical History – entire archive freely available online

The first complete archive of a medical history journal has been deposited into PubMed Central, as part of a £1.25 million programme led by the Wellcome Trust, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). 

In addition to the digitization of the back catalogue, all future issues of Medical History will be made freely available online at the time of publication.

This project supports the Wellcome Trust’s position of supporting open access to scientific literature, and complements the ongoing work to establish a UK PubMed Central. 

(Bold print mine.  See full announcement.)

The editors of Medical History also announced the move to Open Access in a statement in July 2005, and an agreement was signed between the Wellcome Trust and UCL in September 2005 that stipulated that all intellectual property for the journal was vested in UCL, that all management decisions would be taken by the editors at the UCL Wellcome Centre, and that the journal would be completely Open Access.

Following these changes, the entire archive of Medical History, from 1957 to the present, was digitized and put online at PubMedCentral (here), and publication in print and online was handled by the British Medical Journal Group.

Between 2005 and 2011, in accordance with the Wellcome Trust's Open Access policy, each issue of Medical History has appeared in print and online more or less simultaneously.  As the Trust says on its website,

It is a fundamental part of our charitable mission to ensure that the work we fund can be read and utilised by the widest possible audience. We therefore support unrestricted access to the published outputs of research through our open access policy.

Not only were the articles in Medical History published Open Access, but the journal charged no Article Processing Fee (APF).  For both authors and readers, Medical History was free. And authors retained their copyright under a Creative Commons license.  These are the most enlightened policies in the three key issues of modern academic publishing: free authorship, free readership, and authors' retention of copyright.  (A large contemporary literature discusses the new business models underlying these new structures of academic publishing.)

As everyone knows, these policies are critically important for authors on low incomes, including scholars from eastern Europe and many parts of Asia and Africa.  Only these policies guarantee that readers everywhere can benefit from research findings, and that researchers can contribute their own work for open publication and dissemination without encountering a financial barrier.  The Wellcome Trust and the journal's editors broke important new ground in this policy change, adopting the highest ethical and research standards.

2006: EAHMJ partnership

In 2006, Medical History partnered with the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, becoming the official journal of that association, and accepting EAHMH members onto its board of editors (announcement).  In doing so, the journal returned to its roots in one sense, since it had started in 1957 as the organ of a consortium of medical history societies.  At the time of writing (spring 2012), the EAHMH website still presents Medical History as its society journal, stating that,

The EAHMH encourages publication in the journal Medical History. Medical History is a refereed journal devoted to all aspects of the history of medicine and health, with the goal of broadening and deepening the understanding of the field, in the widest sense, by historical studies of the highest quality. It is also the journal of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health. The membership of the Editorial Board, which includes senior members of the EAHMH, reflects the commitment to the finest international standards in refereeing of submitted papers and the reviewing of books.

Plans were made in 2009 to bring Medical History and the EAHMH closer together, creating a single subscription to both the journal and to the society.  However, before these plans could be finalized, the Wellcome Centre closed and the management of the journal moved briefly into limbo.

2010: The Wellcome Trust Centre shuts

The chief editors of Medical History were always senior research staff at the Wellcome Historical Medical Library.  That institution changed its name several times, finally becoming the "Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London" in 2000 (announcement by its then Director Roy Porter).

Ten years later, in 2010, in a controversial change of policy, the Wellcome Trust announced the closure of the Wellcome Centre (Wellcome Trust announcement, Times Higher Education reports here, and here, The Telegraph).  The majority of senior staff retired or dispersed to other centres worldwide, and Centre's programs in teaching and research were closed.  A small cross-departmental group remained at UCL, focussing on the history of neuroscience (here).  What would happen to Medical History?

2011: Interregnum

After the closing of the Wellcome Trust Centre, editorial control of the journal passed to UCL staff, including Roger Cooter and Vivian Nutton, who wrote an editorial statement in 2011 that was bullish about the future health of the journal, in spite of the closure of the Centre and the presumed loss of Wellcome Trust funding (Nutton and Cooter 2011 and  Cooter 2011).  Just one more issue of Medical History has appeared in the Open Access PubMedCentral archive since the last statement, the fourth and last for 2011.  At the time of writing (Feb 2012), references to Medical History on the UCL website lead to dead links.

2012: Cambridge University Press takes over

An announcement on 30 Jan 2012 by Cambridge University Press explains that the editorial control of Medical History has moved to the University of York, and that the journal has a new editor, Sanjoy Bhattacharya, a reviews editor, and an editorial board comprising no fewer than forty-six members, about thirty more editors than the journal has ever had before.  The journal is still supported by the Wellcome Trust, though details are not given.  According to an announcement by Bhattacharya, "the ownership of this journal has passed to Cambridge University Press." 

Cambridge University Press (CUP) is now operating the journal as a Closed Access journal.  If you wish to publish your article Open Access with a Creative Commons license, and retain your own copyright, you must pay $1350 or £850 (here).  CUP requires all non-paying authors to sign a contract transferring their copyright to CUP (contracts here).  The contract permits authors to post a pre-publication, pre-final-editing copy on their own or their university's website.  The terms also state that, "All articles will automatically be deposited in PubMedCentral upon publication" (statement).  But since PubMedCentral is an Open Access, full text website, it is hard to see why an author would pay $1350 if the full text of their article is to appear free in PubMedCentral in any case.  The answer seems to be in the terms of CUP's contract, that suggests that it only the pre-publication version of articles that will appear in PubMedCentral from now on, and not the final published version, as in the past.

At the time of writing (Feb 2012) the January issue of Medical History has not appeared in PubMedCentral.  It will be interesting to see the terms on which it does appear there.

CUP website

PubMedCentral

Cambridge University Press is keen to promote the journal by pointing to its illustrious past, and has a "Highlights of a Decade" page, showcasing selected articles.  But several of these articles, although originally published Open Access and copyrighted by their authors, are presented on CUP's website as being published by CUP, and have been assigned a DOI pointing to CUP's website, and a statement that the article was published online on 07 December 2011.  There is no reference to PubMedCentral, where the articles were actually published online, and much earlier, and where they are still freely downloadable.  CUP did not publish these articles.  The full text of the articles is not available on the CUP website, nor is there any suggestion that these "Highlights of a Decade" can be read freely at PubMedCentral.

Maybe CUP will solve these problems in the future, and come to a more graceful accommodation with the Medical History's Open Access past.

---

References and notes

Editors of Medical History:

• W. J. Bishop, (1957-1961), 5 years.
• F. N. L. Poynter (1962-1972),  11 years.
• Edwin Clarke (1973-1979),  7 years.
• William F. Bynum and Vivian Nutton (1980-1999),  21 years.
• William F. Bynum and Anne Hardy (2000-2002), 3 years.
• Harold J. Cook and Anne Hardy (2003- 2010), 8 years.
• Vivian Nutton and Roger Cooter (2011),
• Sanjoy Bhattacharya (2012- )

Resources

• John Symons, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine : a Short History (London: Wellcome Trust, 1993), is the best account of the Institute's history.
• Vivian Nutton, "Half a Century of Medical History" Medical History, 2007: 1-2, is a brief overview of the journal's history.

Declaration of interest

I have published in Medical History.

Burning the Library of Alexandria, again

The website formerly known as http://library.nu used to provide free downloads of PDFs of published academic books, often in violation of copyright. A few days ago, a consortium of publishers aggressively closed down the site and is seeking to bankrupt the people who ran it, and possibly send them to jail.

At the request of 17 publishing companies in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, including HarperCollins, Oxford University Press and Macmillan, a Munich judge on Monday granted injunctions against illegal posting or sharing of online book files by two websites. Library.nu is alleged to have posted links to hundreds of thousands of illegal PDF copies of books since December 2010, Ed McCoyd, an attorney for the Association of American Publishers, told The Huffington Post. The majority of these uploads allegedly went through the website iFile.it, he said.
The coordinated legal action came after seven months of private investigation and was led by a German publishing association, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, and the International Publishers Association.

The Munich court served Library.nu and iFile.it 17 separate injunctions, representing 10 book titles from each of the publishers. One of the injunctions, which The Huffington Post viewed in a translation from the original German, states that every Web link -- either on iFile.it or Library.nu -- leading to an illegal online copy of one of the named books would result in a fine of 250,000 euros or as much as six months in jail.-- from the Huffington Post, which gives more detail. See also The Verge, Indie Bookspot, etc.

The maxium fine would thus be 17 publishers x 10 books x $250,000 = $42,500,000. 

Instead of going after the library.nu guys, the publishers' coalition should have hired them, and monetized the site as a subscription service for e-books, like iTunes for music.  Shortsighted publishers, locked into yesterday's world-view, a discipline-and-punish approach, and an eagerness for excessive profit.  Predictably enough, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels is amongst the strongest supporters of the pernicious and controversial ACTA legislation that has been widely opposed in street demonstrations across Europe this year (WikiPedia).

It is particularly hypocritical that in their press release, the publishers' conglomerate cites as the first reason for their action, "the interest of the authors who depend on fair compensation for their work."  Academic authors are routinely exploited by commercial publishers, who drive down royalties to single-figure percentages (normally only paid after the publishers have first recouped their own investment), and impose binding contracts on authors that deny them even the basic right to make a single photocopy of their own work, or to pass on their copyright to their legal heirs after death.  Many academic publishers pay no royalties at all.  If academic publishers wanted to offer authors "fair compensation for their work," they should look to their own practices first.

What has annoyed the publishers most, according to their own statement, is that library.nu earned an estimated ten million dollars in advertising revenue.  The period over which this money was made is not mentioned, and one has to query the method by which this estimate was made.  Nevertheless, if it is even partly true, it provides a stinging indictment of the publishers themselves, that they have not had the imagination or creativity to create a business model that could generate this kind of revenue and share it with their authors.

For example, a service like library.nu could be operated as an educational charity, with subscription revenue being shared between authors and charitable educational purposes like research and writing fellowships.  The platform could be used to advertise hard-copy copies of the PDFs, at prices competing with technologies such as the Expresso Book Machine (1 cent per page).  It is a long-established research finding that the distribution of electronic texts frequently boosts the sales of hard copy editions, especially if the advertising is done right (e.g., here, here, and Michael Hart's 1997 report "Electronic Monographs are Great Advertising").

As one commentator has noted, the library.nu archive, estimated at about 400,000 books, still exists.  You can't put the genie back in the bottle.  The whereabouts of the archive is not easily discovered (I don't know it), but it may be in Russia somewhere.  Suing it's creators will not solve the problem in the longer run.

We need to learn two lessons from this:

1. Anyone systematically archiving in-copyright publications needs to watch out!
2. In the modern, networked world, the true price of a publication is the value to a person of a clean conscience. 
   In principle, all books, films and music are and will be available for free download, for anyone willing to break the law of copyright.  But many people do not wish to live like that, and would willingly pay a reasonable price in order to have a clean conscience.  THAT is the future market value of an electronic cultural asset, not a figure calculated on the basis of production costs, shareholder returns, or authors' royalties.  

So, what is the price of a clean conscience?  It's hard to say, but on a per-book basis, I would say it is quite low.  It seems to me that Netflix has it about right: $7.99 per month in the USA, £5.99 per month in the UK, for unlimited online streamed film watching.  Lovefilm.com in the UK is offering unlimited streamed films at £4.99 per month.  

There are two interesting things about Netflix and Lovefilm's business model.  First, the low prices.  Second, the subscription model.  The subscription gives the company a steady, predictable income from month to month, which is a major gain.  A more-or-less captive group of customers, most of whom will not frequently change their subscriptions.

It has been rumoured for quite a while that Amazon is thinking about a subscription service for downloadable books, and with their Kindle service they certainly have the infrastructure for this.  The kno.com service for academic course books does something along these lines: e-textbooks for about 50% of the hard-copy prices, but with content enrichment (online features for note-taking, etc.).  It's not subscription - nobody is there yet - but it's close.

See also:

• http://e-library-free.blogspot.com/
• http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012227143813304790.html