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.

Sanskrit aṅga अङ्ग not a "limb"

Monier-Williams' dictionary, p.7

 In most of our dictionaries, we find that the Sanskrit word aṅga अङ्ग means "limb, member."  "A limb of the body" says MW, following his teacher Wilson.
As a result, when we have expressions like aṣṭāṅgayoga अष्टाङ्गयोग or aṣṭāṅgavidyā अष्टाङ्गविद्या, we commonly get translations like, "yoga of eight limbs" or "the science with eight limbs (medicine)."
If you open the bonnet (US hood) of your car, you see an engine with ... what?  Limbs?  I don't think so.  I think you see components, or parts.  A textbook is divided into, what, limbs?  No, sections, or parts. 

H. H. Wilson's dictionary, p.9

I'd love to see translators of the word aṅga  अङ्ग try harder, and offer some inner resistance to the dead hand of our nineteenth-century dictionaries.  It's as if a mass of [dictionary] words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details (with sincerest apologies to Orwell.)
Next time you see aṣṭāṅgayoga अष्टाङ्गयोग, allow yourself to think instead, "the yoga with eight components." Or when you see aṣṭāṅgavidyā अष्टाङ्गविद्या, think, perhaps, "the science with eight parts."  If you see vedāṅga  वेदाङ्ग translated as "limb of the Veda," you can be sure that the translator isn't seeing the metaphors s/he's using.  What on earth would a "limb of the Veda" possibly be?  All the original author is saying is that the Veda has components or adjunct parts.  And don't let yourself use "ancilliary" either.  When did you last see that in a contemporary English novel?  In my dictionary, it's flagged as "very rare."
Too often, we indologists write and translate in mental companionship with our predecessors from the nineteenth century, and we write for colleagues who too often do the same. 
If you find yourself writing "limb" for aṅga अङ्ग, snap out of it.
Here I am, with Orwell, jeering loudly at worn-out and useless dictionary-bound translations.

Update 

For an argument in favour of "auxiliary" or "subsidiary" see S. Vasudeva (2004) The Yoga of the Mālinīvijayottaratantra (Pondicherry), p. 367, n. 1:

    

Iamus and Intentionality

In the article "Iamus, classical music's computer composer, live from Malaga" (in the Online Guardian), Philip Ball describes the computer program Iamus that is emerging as a disturbing presence in the field of modern classical music. While discussing how we seek for authorial meaning and significance music, he asks,

How does a performer interpret these pieces, given that there's no "intention" of the composer to look for? "Suppose I found a score in a library without knowing who wrote it," says Díaz-Jerez. "I approach these pieces as I would that one – by analysing the score to see how it works." In that respect, he sees no difference from deducing the structure of a Bach fugue.

You can compare it with computer chess, says the philosopher of music Stephen Davies, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. "People said computers wouldn't be able to show the same original thinking, as opposed to crunching random calculations. But now it's hard to see the difference between people and computers with respect to creativity in chess. Music, too, is rule-governed in a way that should make it easily simulated."

This reminds me strongly of the discussion that took place amongst Mīmāṃsaka philosophers in India about the possibility of a injunctive force being exerted by a scripture having no author and therefore no inherent intentionality (see, e.g., John Taber on this topic).

What would a Mīmāṃsaka say about computer-generated music?  Or computer-generated scripture, for that matter?

And can you tell human- and computer-generated music apart?  Take this test :-)

Well-mannered Medicine published

I'm ever so proud about the publication this month of Dagmar's new book, Well-Mannered Medicine: Medical Ethics and Etiquette in Classical Ayurveda.

Please note that there are now two different "D. Wujastyk"s publishing on the history of science and medicine in South Asia. :-)

Here's the blurb:

Well-Mannered Medicine explores the moral discourses on the practice of medicine in the foundational texts of Ayurveda.

The classical ayurvedic treatises were composed in Sanskrit between the first and the seventh centuries CE, and later works, dating into the sixteenth century CE, are still considered strongly authoritative.  As Wujastyk shows, these works testify to an elaborate system of medical ethics and etiquette. Physicians looked to the ayurvedic treatises for a guide to professional conduct. Ayurvedic discourses on good medical practice depict the physician as highly-educated, skilled, moral, and well-mannered. The rules of conduct positioned physicians within mainstream society and characterized medical practice as a trustworthy and socially acceptable profession. At the same time, professional success was largely based on a particular physician's ability to cure his patients. This resulted in tension, as some treatments and medications were considered socially or religiously unacceptable. Doctors needed to treat their patients successfully while ostensibly following the rules of acceptable behavior.
Wujastyk offers insight into the many unorthodox methods of avoiding conflict while ensuring patient compliance shown in the ayurvedic treatises, giving a disarmingly candid perspective on the realities of medical practice and its crucial role in a profoundly well-mannered society.

---

Editorial Reviews

"Dagmar Wujastyk's thorough study of medical ethics in classical Ayurvedic texts adds substantially to our knowledge of Ayurveda as a medical system. Ethics here includes the moral attributes required of a physician, personal presentation, medical education, the doctor-patient relationship, medical deception, and much more. In this first rate study, Wujastyk avoids the danger of evaluating Ayurveda from the standpoint of Western medicine. This is required reading for everyone with an interest in Indian medicine or cross-cultural medical history."--Frederick M. Smith, Professor of Sanskrit and Classical Indian Religions, University of Iowa

About the Author

Dagmar Wujastyk is a postdoctoral research fellow at Zurich University in Switzerland and co-editor of Modern and Global Ayurveda - Pluralism and Paradigms. She has taught Sanskrit at the University of Bonn and Cambridge University.

Sanskrit hyphenation list

I'm gradually building up a file of hyphenated Sanskrit words and compounds, written in the Latin alphabet.  The file is called sanskrit-hyphenations.tex, and you are welcome to download it.

It contains hyphenation points for words in English (ayur-veda), and for words in Sanskrit (āyur-veda).
 To use it, do something like this in your style file:

\setotherlanguage{sanskrit}
\newfontfamily\sanskritfont{Sanskrit 2003}
% Define \sansk{} which is the same as \emph{}, except
% that it causes appropriate hyphenation
% for Sanskrit words.  Use \sansk{} for Sanskrit and
% \emph{} for English.
\newcommand{\sansk}[1]{\emph{\textsanskrit{#1}}}

 and \input the sanskrit-hyphenations.tex file after \begin{document}, thus:

\begin{document}
  \input{sanskrit-hyphenations.tex}
...
\end{document}

XeTeX  already has built-in hyphenation rules for Devanāgarī and Romanized Sanskrit. The above file is intended to extend the hyphenation coverage for Romanized words, using etymological and stylistic considerations.

(Deep breath) Medical history again

The story so far

My three previous blogs on this topic are, in chronological order,  1 here, 2 here, and 3 here.
(All my blogs on the topic of the journal Medical History are collected here.)

1. In the first post, I sketched the history of this important journal and expressed regret about the journal's move from the Free-to-read, Open Access, author's copyright model to a pay-to-read, closed access, publisher's copyright model. 
   
   The journal's new editor, Sanjoy Bhattacharya, responded here, defending the new policies.
2. I responded here, noting that the new website was inconsistent, and that there were unsolved contradictions about payment structures, and that in no case did the publisher offer the author the option of retaining copyright.
3. When the first new issue appeared in January 2012, I noted that articles were freely downloadable and authors were ascribed copyright. This was very good for the authors and readers, but some contradictory information about rights and payments continued to be present on the publisher's website. 

And now...

No abstract

The April 2012 issue of Medical History is out.  I'm sorry indeed to see that things have changed for both this issue and the previous January one.  The freedoms that were earlier present in the January issue have been revoked.  The statements giving authors copyright have been removed.  Articles are not freely downloadable.

No way to read the article...

Most bizarre of all, no articles are now readable at all.  Even at a price.  The website give abstracts for most - but not all - articles (see above right).  But that's all.  Even if you have an account with the CUP journals site, and log in, you still cannot read any articles in Medical History.
You can link to them, you can refer to them, you can link, blog and write to the author.  You can request permissions, e.g., to reprint or copy the article.  You can do most things, except reading the articles (see left).

This surely has to be a temporary glitch?

If you are logging in from an institutional licensee, such as a university network, then yes, you can download the PDFs.  But if you do not have such an affiliation, then you cannot download any article.

No downloads at PMC

I thought that perhaps the articles were now at Pub Med Central (PMC), as Sanjoy had said they would be, and that readers were meant to know this and read the articles from there.  But that's not the case either.  Neither of the new issues has appeared at PMC (see right).  It was always understood that there would be a time-lag before articles appeared at PMC, and the journal is starting again from zero, administratively speaking, so perhaps it's just a matter of patience before the freely-downloadable version of the articles appear.

Subscription prices

However, as long as an individual cannot download the articles at all from anywhere, I suppose the only way to read the journal is to order a printed copy.  But one can only buy the printed journal if one is an organisation (left).  So for anyone who doesn't have access to an institutional licence, access to Medical History is limited or impossible.

Back issues

And, confusingly, CUP is offering to sell rights to consult the past archive, that the Wellcome Trust has paid for already to be freely available at PMC: "... access to the digitised archive must be purchased separately. Please email [so-and-so] for a tailored package quote." This again must be a glitch.

In general, it looks as if CUP is trying to fit Medical History into a Procrustean bed designed for its other more commercial offerings.

On CUP's MH website under "back issues / digitised archive," selected past issues of MH are now displayed (see right).  But once again, there is no button for actually downloading a PDF for any of the articles.  Nor is there any link to PMC, where whole journal from 1957-2011 is already available free.

New Open Access Policy

I think the terms of the Open Access agreement for Medical History have changed since I last looked at them.  I don't remember seeig the following statement:

If you choose to publish your article in this way [Open Access] you are required to complete the following form, within one week of your
manuscript being accepted for publication by Medical History. If you prefer not to take part in the Open Access option,
you need not do anything; your article will be published in the usual way, with access to the complete text being available only
to subscribers. [my bold]
The corresponding author should complete this form, and by doing so he or she authorises that the full charge of £425/$675,
plus VAT where applicable, will be paid.

CUP will NOT grant Open Access to your article unless you pay them $675.  This statement raises serious questions about whether all articles will continue to appear in PMC, as asserted by Sanjoy and as desired by the Wellcome Trust.

Summary

So, where do things stand now?

1. Authors don't have copyright, in any model of publication in MH.
2. Articles are not freely downloadable.
3. Articles cannot be downloaded at all by private persons, even for purchase.
4. Private persons apparently cannot buy the print version of journal issues.
5. CUP wants to charge for access to past archived issues of the journal.
6. No article will be available Open Access unless $675 is paid by the author.

I still hope that some of these issues are just teething problems.  I also hope that, as Sanjoy said, articles will appear as free downloads at the PMC site, in a "version of record," and that the current de facto embargo period of six months and growing is also just an initial administrative problem.

Between 2005 and 2011, Medical History was an Open Access journal that assigned copyright to individual authors, and charged no fee to authors or to readers.  The journal embraced all the best and most innovative models of the distribution of scholarly knowledge (see Open knowledge, Open definition, Open Access).   That model of publication has been abandoned, in favour of a closed-access, strongly commercialized system.  If all MH articles start to appear for free, full-text, version-of-record download at PMC, it will make a big difference.  But it remains hard to see how the commercial and copyright requirements of CUP can be squared with free distribution though PMC.