CUP corrects the copyright statement on MH back issues

True to their word, as reported yesterday, CUP has now corrected the copyright statements attached to the back-issues of articles from the journal Medical History.  This recognizes the fact that the copyright of these articles belongs to their authors.

I'm still not sure that it's right to say "Published by Cambridge University Press."  I believe my article was published by University College London, who were the publishers of the journal at the time my article was published in 2007.  Nor is the "published online 17 May 2012" right, since it was published online in 2007 by PMC.  I hope that these issues can also be straightened out.

Current article also (C) its author.

 To my surprise, this change in copyright statement now also applies to articles published this year, 2012, during the period since CUP has taken over the journal.  As mentioned in earlier blogs, the documentation on the CUP pages says clearly that OUP will take possession of the copyright of all articles, whether published Open or Closed Access. Do we have a glitch, or a genuine new policy here?

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.

Smallpox history: The Madras Courier for 12 January 1819

 

In my 1987 paper, "A Pious Fraud: The Indian Claims for pre-Jennerian Smallpox Vaccination"  I traced all claims for pre-Jennerian smallpox vaccination to a single newspaper report that appeared in the Madras Courier for 12 January 1819.  I have now uploaded scans of this issue of the Madras Courier to archive.org: for posterity. The images at archive.org are large enough to read properly.

The claim for pre-Jennerian vaccination in a Sakteya Grantham (see first two columns)

The above image is too small to read, but you can read this one from archive.org.

Smallpox MS in Sanskrit

MS R.15.86 in the library of Trinity College Cambridge is a tract in Sanskrit in the Bengali script about smallpox.  To the right is the description of this MS in Aufrecht's 1869 catalogue of the Trinity collection (click to enlarge).

The work is described as Rājasiṃhasudhāsaṃgrahanāmni granthe Masūrikācikitsādhyāyaḥ, meaning "The chapter on therapies for smallpox in the book called The Collection of Nectar of Rajasinha."  Aufrecht says it's by a Mahādeva.  It's hard to know who either Mahādeva or Rājasiṃha might be.  A work called Siṃhasudhānidhi "Collected Nectar of the Lion" was composed by one Prince Devīsiṃha of the Bundela dynasty in the 17 century (Meulenbeld, History of Indian Medical Literature, v. IIA, p. 299), but that's a long shot.  Rājasiṃha is a bit of a generic name, "King-Lion".  All Sikhs have "siṃha" (=Singh) as part of their names.  Could be anyone, really.  The MS collection comes from John Bentley (d.1824), who was a historian of astronomy in early 19 cent Calcutta (he wrote A historical view of the Hindu astronomy (1825)).  The MS has written on it in a copper-plate script on the last leaf, "The Forgery of the Hindu respecting the Cowpock-innoculation."  Probably Bentley's hand, though I'm not certain.  The verses on p.25 that Aufrecht says "are open to the suspicion of modern authorship" say,

There are plukes (grantha, knot, lump) on the breasts of cows, with discharge.
One should collect the pus from them, and protect it carefully.
Preceded by the illnesses of Śītalā, having placed on the surface (pratīka?) of a child,
with a small knife a wound like the wound of a mosquito,
having made it enter into the blood, with the pus itself,
and with the bloods on a little brush, the wise person to what is cured.
The very best physician fearlessly approaches (m-? upaiti) on the child _ _ _

My translation is a bit incoherent, because the original is too.  Maybe if I thought about it longer, I might come up with something better, but probably not.  The vocabulary is a bit strange: pratīka for a limb or the surface of the body is unusual; the stuff about a brush may be wrong. Any suggestions gratefully received.