Fair use

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

Two responses, Arne:

(1) Webcite is an internet archive service, something like Google cache but longer term. It has nothing to do with copyright laws. Although some copyright holders might prefer not being linked to, others (.e.g. the European Commission, for its copyright works) insist on it. There is no general rule.

(2) "Fair use" is the concept of reasonable citation along with image reproduction. Academics use it all the time: however, you may be interested to know that the paranoia is out of control in the UK. In one case, a UK publisher demanded that I obtain copyright permission to reproduce an image (even though it was clearly fair use); in another, a UK uni demanded that I produce legal evidence that I have copyright over one of my own publications  (in a journal) before they would link to a pre-press version of it. Actually, most journal publishers have no problem with online free pre-publication versions, but the UK unis do.... They are all terrified of legal action against them, so implement a version of copyright that is actually worse than the legal reality.

(3) Fair use in most developed legal systems is not a problem, provided that you understand the law. Most people do not. This is why CZ developed the guidelines.

[Arne Eickenberg]

IMPORTANT NOTE: Only now have I realized that the "right of quotation" in continental law (e.g. German Urheberrecht) is basically the same as "fair use" under 17 USC 107.

(1) On WebCite: That was just an example of creating permanent links, here specifically in the event of inline linking. If a copyright holder prefers not being linked to, there is nothing he can do about it, because once I quote from one of his publications (to which I have every right), it is my duty as an author to link to him in the context of a quote, whether text or image. With WebCite however, I actually avoid the direct link to his website by referring to a stable and neutral copy. If I choose to quote a small passage or a scientific conclusion or an image from a copyrighted work, there's nothing anyone can do about it, as long as the quotation is directly related to the contents of my article.

(2) Depending on the journal it's similar in other countries. Just a few months ago a German journal rejected an article I had written with a colleague, saying that it had already been pre-published on the internet. We then published it in Spain, so there was no real harm done.

Which brings me to an important question: Are articles published on the internet but not in a scientific journal to be regarded by CZ as "reliable sources" in the context of verifiability? Many journals in the UK and Germany do apparently believe they are. They regard them as published. So I submit that we should conform at CZ and allow quotes from articles published online. However, I'm not talking about quoting from blogs or anything.

On "fair use"—examples from an article I've written on the name Gaius Iulius Caesar. These examples are of course hypothetical, because in reality all images were uploaded with permission:

(i) To my mind the first image (marriage ceremony) does not fall under "fair use". True, the article mentions Roman marriage ceremonies, but the image does not enhance the contents, does not underline and/or explain the marriage vow. It's only a nice image.

(ii)/(iii) The second and third images (Iulus & Vediovis) have a closer relation to the text, because they are depictions of the mythological past of the Julian dynasty, which is in turn important for the etymology. So they might fall under "fair use", but I wouldn't be annoyed if the copyright holder asked for a removal, because they are not really necessary for a better understanding of the text.

(iv) The fourth image would definitely fall under "fair use", because the coin is directly linked to Caesar's own etymological explanation of his name: the elephant, the historical context (victory over Gaul) etc.

So I could have uploaded image 4 (and maybe also images 2 and 3) under "fair use" without asking for permission, but (to my mind) not image 1.

In the end my question remains—in the event that "fair use" doesn't apply and permissions are unobtainable: What's with inline linking/embedding of external images? Additional question: Any copyright ramifications? It's not a duplication. At best it's a re-broadcast or something.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

Well, some people are going to hate our discussion! (Hi, Hayford  )

You are right about WebCite as an alternative linking site. I was thinking of cases where the EC refused to allow copies of works on other sites: their legal complaint will be directly with WebCite and not with CZ

The prepublication thing is now accepted by leading British publishers (at least, the ones I have published with) so the German journal is really being very nasty. Apart from anything, it is quite normal to put a preliminary journal article as a working paper, usually online.

The issue of acceptable sources is at the discretion of CZ editors. I do not recommend a CZ policy on online sources, because that discretion is an specialised expert judgement. But generally, academic working papers and other unpublished things on research websites should be OK: my own working paper series is cited in leading journals and IMF, World Bank etc publications. (On the other hand, some papers online are poor quality, so blanket acceptance should not be a rule.) I oppose citation of newspapers other than for rapidly published news and facts: this is in contradiction to the opinion of the EiC.

Your images in the CZ article:

(i) Yes, I agree with you except that the image owner states this as their policy:

Policy for Image Use: The images in the VRoma Archive are freely available for all non-commercial use on the web. Users may link to the images on the VRoma server or download them for use on their own server. It is not necessary to write for permission for non-commercial internet use, but we do ask that credit be given to the VRoma Project, preferably with a link to the VRoma Home Page

[BTW: your image tag is incomplete, it helps other users to know more http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Image:AncientRomanMarriage.jpg]

(ii & iii): The interpretation of "fair use" is -- to my mind -- too contextual to be easily determined, and will probably vary from one legal system to another. I would assume that it is safe to use it, on the grounds that any legal action could not claim damages therefore could be circumvented simply by responding to a complaint. I doubt that anyone cares.

(iv) yes


So, all of these images probably did not require permission! The issues with online linking are (a) stability of link; (b) extra time taken to load the page, when the internet is slow. The latter problem is proving very serious, I have noted with people's blogs and newspapers.

[Hayford Peirce]

Well, some people are going to hate our discussion! (Hi, Hayford  )

Naw, the eye simply glazes over and moves on to the next thing, maybe the room where the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo....

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

Do you measure your life in coffee spoons, too, Hayford? But our discussion on "fair use" is no wasteland! 

[Peter Schmitt]

Which brings me to an important question: Are articles published on the internet but not in a scientific journal to be regarded by CZ as "reliable sources" in the context of verifiability? Many journals in the UK and Germany do apparently believe they are. They regard them as published. So I submit that we should conform at CZ and allow quotes from articles published online. However, I'm not talking about quoting from blogs or anything.

There is no simple answer to this, I fear.

The problem with journals has nothing to do with content (and the country), but with copyright. Some publishers insist on complete transfer of copyrights,
and this would no longer be possible if the article is available on the internet.
(Mathematicians and mathematical organizations oppose this policy, but have only partially succeeded.)

Online papers may or may not be peer reviewed, so one has to check if the source is (reasonably) reliable or not.
For instance, the arXiv is a preprint archive for theoretical physics and mathematics. Many mathematicians and physicians put their papers there before they get published. Usually they are reliable. There are even famous and important papers there which
have never been published. If published elsewhere, this can be added to the metadata there.
But, of course, some crank can also put his work on the server. If it is noticed, a comment can be added.

There are reliable sites of scientific institutions, and also some dedicated private sites.
There are also some blogs by prominent mathematicians. I would consider these as reliable.
(It is a different problem whether these sources are stabile.)

On the other hand, (peer reviewed) publications by academic publishers are also not fail-save.
This summer, Springer published an engineering book which - hidden in some final chapters -
claimed to have proved the Goldbach conjecture.
Even worse, it turned out that some years earlier its author has succeeded to place a paper
on this in a minor (but established) journal.

The bottom line, I think, is that there are no rules. It is one of the things experts have to judge.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

Yes, I agree, Peter. This is a case-by-case editorial judgement. Whereas at one time, publication in a peer-reviewed journal really meant something, this is no longer true. It is a reasonable defence for undergrad students, that they read it in such a journal, but not for serious academics 

At the same time, the recent trend has been to publish online because of the absurd delays in journal publishing -- sometimes waiting over 2.5 years for reviewing and space for publication. Thus, many online articles are actually of better quality than some in refereed journals. However, many are also a pile of shi*. Thus, I do not permit even Master's level students to use internet sources without explicit permission: a few (God help me) try to use Wikipedia! It takes real expertise in the area to know what can be trusted, but this is now also true (to a lesser extent) of journals.

[Daniel Mietchen]

I would like to add that more and more "established" journals are moving to online only, and new journals are almost exclusively started such (e.g. Nature Communications, scheduled to be launched next week). The main criterion used to assess the quality so far is non-public pre-publication peer review by usually two-three experts.

But variations on this theme keep cropping up: There is public pre-publication peer review in journals like Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, while post-publication peer review can happen to anything and is the norm at blogs (mine often deals with these topics, e.g. here).

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

I would like to add that more and more "established" journals are moving to online only, and new journals are almost exclusively started such (e.g. Nature Communications, scheduled to be launched next week). The main criterion used to assess the quality so far is non-public pre-publication peer review by usually two-three experts.

But variations on this theme keep cropping up: There is public pre-publication peer review in journals like Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, while post-publication peer review can happen to anything and is the norm at blogs (mine often deals with these topics, e.g. here).

As always (sigh), social science lags well behind the natural sciences, computing etc. We are still stuck with printed copy, slow (and often low-quality) peer review processes, and over-priced journals. In one case, of a major US journal, I am informed of a colleague in the USA who resigned as editor because of the nepotism and corruption in the refereering and selection of articles...

[Daniel Mietchen]

I would like to add that more and more "established" journals are moving to online only, and new journals are almost exclusively started such (e.g. Nature Communications, scheduled to be launched next week). The main criterion used to assess the quality so far is non-public pre-publication peer review by usually two-three experts.

But variations on this theme keep cropping up: There is public pre-publication peer review in journals like Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, while post-publication peer review can happen to anything and is the norm at blogs (mine often deals with these topics, e.g. here).

As always (sigh), social science lags well behind the natural sciences, computing etc. We are still stuck with printed copy, slow (and often low-quality) peer review processes, and over-priced journals. In one case, of a major US journal, I am informed of a colleague in the USA who resigned as editor because of the nepotism and corruption in the refereering and selection of articles...

You may be in a better position to judge that but the Economics e-journal operates the same model as Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, so things are moving elsewhere too.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

I would like to add that more and more "established" journals are moving to online only, and new journals are almost exclusively started such (e.g. Nature Communications, scheduled to be launched next week). The main criterion used to assess the quality so far is non-public pre-publication peer review by usually two-three experts.

But variations on this theme keep cropping up: There is public pre-publication peer review in journals like Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, while post-publication peer review can happen to anything and is the norm at blogs (mine often deals with these topics, e.g. here).

As always (sigh), social science lags well behind the natural sciences, computing etc. We are still stuck with printed copy, slow (and often low-quality) peer review processes, and over-priced journals. In one case, of a major US journal, I am informed of a colleague in the USA who resigned as editor because of the nepotism and corruption in the refereering and selection of articles...

You may be in a better position to judge that but the Economics e-journal operates the same model as Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, so things are moving elsewhere too.

Yes, economics tends to follow the natural sciences, owing to its emphasis on hypothesis testing, modelling and quantitative techniques. I suppose eventually the other social sciences will shift their complacent asses.

[Daniel Mietchen]

I would like to add that more and more "established" journals are moving to online only, and new journals are almost exclusively started such (e.g. Nature Communications, scheduled to be launched next week). The main criterion used to assess the quality so far is non-public pre-publication peer review by usually two-three experts.

But variations on this theme keep cropping up: There is public pre-publication peer review in journals like Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, while post-publication peer review can happen to anything and is the norm at blogs (mine often deals with these topics, e.g. here).

As always (sigh), social science lags well behind the natural sciences, computing etc. We are still stuck with printed copy, slow (and often low-quality) peer review processes, and over-priced journals. In one case, of a major US journal, I am informed of a colleague in the USA who resigned as editor because of the nepotism and corruption in the refereering and selection of articles...

You may be in a better position to judge that but the Economics e-journal operates the same model as Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, so things are moving elsewhere too.

Yes, economics tends to follow the natural sciences, owing to its emphasis on hypothesis testing, modelling and quantitative techniques. I suppose eventually the other social sciences will shift their complacent asses.

I wish economists would actually go more visibly for testing hypotheses and the underlying assumptions - how else can it be that they still, in vast majorities, see economic growth as a long-term goal (on basically any economic level), despite finite resources?

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

The answer is simple: mainstream economics is discipline-bound, and most people find it easier just to follow the paradigm that they're told to follow.  Political management of academic financing, control over journal content, and the general conservatism of university economics departments all contribute to discouraging any challenge to the underlying assumptions. Thus, economics superfically resembles the natural sciences, but functionally is closer to the pre-Reformation position of the sciences. These days, it is politicians and the mass media who dictate the "acceptable reality" of economics, as opposed to the Catholic Church.

There are small pockets of alternative approaches, including a few people with whom I studied political economy and economics. Mostly they are neo-marxist in approach, although there are other perspectives these days. Some of them we had interaction with on CZ, but there were problems with intellectual coherence, self-promotion and other issues 

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

The answer is simple: mainstream economics is discipline-bound, and most people find it easier just to follow the paradigm that they're told to follow.  Political management of academic financing, control over journal content, and the general conservatism of university economics departments all contribute to discouraging any challenge to the underlying assumptions. Thus, economics superfically resembles the natural sciences, but functionally is closer to the pre-Reformation position of the sciences. These days, it is politicians and the mass media who dictate the "acceptable reality" of economics, as opposed to the Catholic Church.

There are small pockets of alternative approaches, including a few people with whom I studied political economy and economics. Mostly they are neo-marxist in approach, although there are other perspectives these days. Some of them we had interaction with on CZ, but there were problems with intellectual coherence, self-promotion and other issues 

If all the economists in the world were put in a single line, they'd face in different directions.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

Ha! That's partly true, and partly not. It's not so much that they agree on anything, but that there are just a few paradigms or schools that you are supposed to fit into (and mostly these assume that economic growth is imperative). So, in my view at least, there is an excessive variety of opinions but a deficit of paradigms, and little intellectual challenge to these paradigms.