Reflections: June 2008

What’s Mine is Mine, or Is It?
Musings on Copyright and Intellectual Property in the Digital Age

Mary Peet
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This column could be subtitled “Quick, It’s press time: Do you know where your copyright is?” after the anxiety-inducing public service announcement for parents suggesting kids out late at night were juvenile delinquents. In fact, that title paraphrase could itself be a copyright infringement!

“Back in the day,” copyright wasn’t something I paid much attention to, and mostly I was glad to sign anything the publisher sent my way after all the struggles of submission, revision, copyediting, and final acceptance. Posting reprints online wasn’t an issue then. You looked through the actual print copies of the journal for articles, or at best print copies of an index. Anyone remember the days of leafing through paper copies of Current Contents, literally the table of contents pages from journals published in the last month in agriculture? These issues cycled through the department with check off lists because subscriptions were expensive, so they usually weren’t all that current by the time they got to us junior faculty members! I was still happy to peruse them and send out special reprint request postcards. As an author I also received reprint requests in the mail. If the purchased supply of reprints ran out, no one seemed to be too upset if more were photocopied. (Disclaimer to my publishers: I don’t actually know anyone who would do such a thing—this is a theoretical comment, not related to actual authors of your journals, living or dead!).

Now, of course, we hear constantly about the entertainment industry protecting their content. Our home institutions value and protect patents as an important source of revenue and prestige. At NCSU, Sylvia Blankenship’s patent on 1-methylcyclopropene is something we’re all proud of! Plant breeders are all too aware of patents and anyone in the biotechnology and molecular genetics area has to constantly deal with both protecting their discoveries with patents and avoiding infringement of other patents. Many propagation techniques are also patented, including Broccoli sprout production for health benefits (BroccoSprouts). Jim Ballington, our strawberry breeder, will be presenting the ARS/USDA Morrison Lecture on the topic “Toward a More Equitable and Responsible Policy on Intellectual Property as it Relates to Plants” on Tuesday, 22 July from 2:00-4:00 p.m., which will deal with some of the issues raised by current patent policies. Jim just pointed out that technically, this column should have first gone to the University Copyright Committee before publication in the ASHS Newsletter!
Even for those of us not coping on a daily basis with the intricacies and vagaries of patent law, copyright in the digital age requires some thought. Universities are increasingly protective not only of their patents, but of their scholarly articles. Many, including NCSU, have developed digital scholarly repositories to increase the visibility of research conducted at the university, to preserve what might otherwise be scattered and potentially lost, and to help faculty post their publications correctly online:www.lib.ncsu.edu/repository/spr/about. Although NCSU authors submitting material need to consider what their copyright agreements with publishers allow (see a database of publisher copyright policies at www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo), the University also claims a “Shop Right” to use NCSU-generated material for its legitimate activities in teaching, research, and extension, including posting such works in its repository. However, the form of the material posted in repositories may depend on the publisher, which brings me to the copyright issues that prompted me to write this column.
Before sending off (overdue) Acta Horticulturae manuscripts for an upcoming ISHS symposium, I read the “fine print” www.ishs.org/wri/pap1.

I learned that if I’m giving an oral or keynote presentation I must submit a manuscript (posters are optional).

I can only post an “author” (final unedited) submission on my own or a University Scholarly Publications Repository with a statement saying the original publication is available at actahort.org (and I have to wait 12 months after the Acta volume is published to do so). ISHS retains the copyright, and exclusive reproduction and distribution rights of all versions.

My next question was to Mike Neff, our Executive Director. What about ASHS policy, especially since I had already submitted a published .pdf version to the NCSU repository. Oops! Fortunately, ASHS policy is to give full royalty-free rights to all ASHS authors to reproduce or distribute their own work, and to post the .pdf of their work on their own or a university repository web site. (Whew!) While ASHS is the official holder of the copyright, the Copyright Clearance Center is now the authorized agent for the Society for copyright permission requests. We also honor direct requests to ASHS to reproduce articles digitally or in hardcopy for scholarly use. The only requirement is that the authors and the ASHS journal are given proper credit. ASHS authors are encouraged, but not required, to submit work presented at an ASHS conference to the appropriate ASHS journal.

So, where is your copyright? Before submitting your intellectual property to a conference or journal, ask yourself:

• Is manuscript submission required for the conference?
• For both conferences and journals, what are the restrictions on prior or subsequent publication?
• Can you post the final .pdf version?
• Can you use it after publication in your teaching, research and extension without paying a royalty?

As authors we owe it to ourselves, our co-authors, and our research institutions to read the fine print and think about the rights we would be giving up along with the possibility of negotiating modifications to a publisher agreement, before we sign on the proverbial dotted line. In fact, of course, these decisions should be made at the time of submission. With limited budgets, it’s tempting to opt for journals without page charges, but consider the real cost if you, your students, or your university can’t use your material for your own research, teaching, and extension at some time in the future.

At the same time, as authors, we have to respect the rights and needs of the publishers, both the for-profit publishers (even the much-maligned ‘whipping boy’ whose name starts with ‘E’), and the non-profits like ASHS and ISHS. Publishers have costs to cover, and can’t afford to give away material, either through open access publishing (our Executive Director winces every time I use that phrase!) or by allowing content to be widely available to non-subscribers. For ASHS, most of the revenue that supports society activities comes from the publications side, with memberships, conferences, and other activities being either self-supporting or part of our mission as a non-profit. So we need the revenue from page charges, downloads, copyright clearances, individual subscriptions and library subscriptions to support our publications and our professional society. As authors we need to not only read, but also respect, the copyright arrangements we agree to.

We all put a lot of effort into conducting research and preparing manuscripts for publication. I’m going to be taking a little more time now to think about what happens after my manuscript is (hopefully!) accepted for publication in a conference or proceedings! And hopefully after next month when the very capable John Clark takes over as President, I’ll even have time to write those hypothetical manuscripts!

hank you for giving me an opportunity in these “Reflections” columns to harangue and digress on various topics. I look forward to seeing you all in Orlando, where I’ll be handing over my gavel after the Presidential Address!