IEEE Refuses to Accept Public-Domain Papers?

http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html

by powertower • 15 years ago

262 80 15 years ago

cr.yp.to

mturmon3• 15 years ago

This is a very interesting post.

I did not know that authors who are not with the government had tried to put works in the public domain, that are submitted to IEEE. I didn't know this was possible.

I know it certainly is standard policy for government researchers and labs to retain copyright when work is submitted to IEEE (or anywhere).

Sometimes publishers say tough words about how this isn't possible, and you have to sign their copyright form, and you're holding up publication of the work. It's BS. The government copyright people will talk sense into them, and retain copyright so that the work can be distributed openly.

bdonlan• 15 years ago

Federally commissioned works do not 'retain copyright'. They don't have copyright _at all_ (by law). As such, there is no legal basis for restricting copying of such works. Of course, this includes the IEEE - they can republish all they want, they just can't stop anyone else from republishing, because the copyright never existed in the first place.

mturmon3• 15 years ago

But, it's OK to republish the work in any way, including as part of a public web site or government report.

I interpreted this as meaning that the government retains copyright, but that may be the wrong legal phrasing. The point is that the work is freely available.

MostAwesomeDude• 15 years ago

Regarding attempts to put things in the public domain, it is widely held that, at least in the USA, there are two possibilities. The first is that you can declare something to be in the public domain and put it into the public domain. The second is that declaring something to be in the public domain (even without an affadavit) forms a reliable estoppel in case the author wants to exercise his copyright later. The end result is that, either way, public domain dedications are seen by most people as legally reliable.

derleth4• 15 years ago

I'm beginning to doubt the "IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager" has the authority to do what he's doing, and I'm beginning to think this will blow over with an official response from the IEEE saying as much and rescinding this joker's fake 'policy'.

guelo• 15 years ago

What would be the "IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager"'s incentive to act in this manner if not under official order from IEEE to minimize the amount of public domain content?

burgerbrain• 15 years ago

Not everyone acts rationally you know. He could just be an idiot...

Confusion• 15 years ago

This page has been up for years.

derleth4• 15 years ago

Well, that does tend to refute my point if the IEEE's stance hasn't changed in the interim.

mitultiwari• 15 years ago

This is disappointing. It has been hard to find the soft copy of IEEE papers. Now it will be even harder. IEEE is losing it's value among CS people.

Good that most of CS papers are published in ACM conferences, and most of the authors publish a soft copy on their homepages.

Also, more and more CS people are posting their papers on arxiv.org.

chx• 15 years ago

This is ancient (Last-Modified: Mon, 21 Nov 2005), everyone knows this already, why was it posted suddenly?

metafour• 15 years ago

How are you determining the date?

The page itself has no date which I think is unhelpful and I was going to ask if anyone knew when this was posted.

jmillikin• 15 years ago

It's in the HTTP headers. Some browsers (such as Firefox) show it in a "page info" dialog.

pyre2• 15 years ago

  # curl -I http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Server: publicfile
  Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:52:17 GMT
  Last-Modified: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 04:40:39 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Transfer-Encoding: chunked

nknight• 15 years ago

I certainly wasn't aware of it. On what grounds do you assert that "everyone" knows it?

Age of information is not a reliable predictor of its spread.

seclorum2• 15 years ago

Once again, please stop assuming that 'old news' isn't still 'news' to someone. If you were a teenager in 2005, and have since published papers during your continued education, then this news is highly relevant and worthwhile to the discussion of copyright of said works.

Not everyone is old and weary. There are plenty of students in the world who need to learn about these things, and every year a new wave comes. So, that is why re-hashing 'old news' is very important in our tech world today.

qntm• 15 years ago

By the "old news is still news to someone" logic, the same 2500 stories could circulate through the HN front page over and over again forever.

PaddleSlapper• 15 years ago

Though news to me, be aware this is old news - page published 21 November 2005. Has anything changed since then?

doctoboggan• 15 years ago

It will take reputable referees from some journal to volunteer their time to judge papers submitted in the public domain.

fmota• 15 years ago

They volunteer their time anyway. They might as well do so for open access journals.

ajays• 15 years ago

This is why I canceled my membership in IEEE (and ACM). I believe these organizations have gone beyond their stated purpose, and now exist purely to sustain themselves and their monopolies on conferences.

If we just started boycotting them, they'd crumble in no time.

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

If we just started boycotting them, they'd crumble in no time.

Would that be a good thing? I haven't seen much evidence that IEEE is a no-good parasite. It's a huge leap to go from "gone beyond their stated purpose" and "exist purely to sustain themselves".

Don't forget- the last time your computer performed a floating point op, you benefited from the existence of IEEE (IEEE 754). The last time you used a network adapter, you benefited from the IEEE (IEEE 802.3 & 802.11), and I'm guessing it hasn't been long since you last used said adapter.

irahul• 15 years ago

> Don't forget- the last time your computer performed a floating point op, you benefited from the existence of IEEE (IEEE 754)

>The last time you used a network adapter, you benefited from the IEEE (IEEE 802.3 & 802.11),

All IEEE is doing here is acting as a standardization committee. IEEE didn't invent floating points or ethernet adapters.

Not everything is standardized by IEEE(in fact very little, if you are talking computers), and stuff will work fine if IEEE is vaporized today. IEEE didn't invent anything, new stuff will keep getting invented, and if need be, some other label will be stuck on them.

rmc• 15 years ago

Is there any part of the modern web that the IEEE were involved with? TCP? HTTP? etc?

derleth4• 15 years ago

You're forgetting that standardization, if it's going to happen at all, happens due to the companies involved, not entities like the IEEE: If a real-world standard is going to happen it will occur due to the companies deciding it is in their financial best interest. Otherwise, all the IEEE can do is write a pointless standard everyone ignores.

eeeerrrr3• 15 years ago

I'm so sick of people complaining about the IEEE and the ACM. The IEEE is not the Syrian government. If you think you have a simple solution for this problem, nobody will shoot you if you offer your candidacy for president or whatever.

loup-vaillant3• 15 years ago

Part of the solution is precisely to loudly complain about them. Actually, if we want most scientists to not bow to IEEE's terms (which will solve the problem), loud complaints are probably the best one can do.

So, here is my loud complaint: I hereby declare that I find this policy by IEEE outrageous, and that we should boycott them until they change.

Jun8• 15 years ago

I don't think so. First, IEEE has many non-US members who need this sort of central organization to do the job of, for lack of a better phrase, "reputation management", e.g. senior members, fellows, etc. Such things are taken into account when asking for grants. For students, IEEE is an excellent mentorship organization.

We don't want IEEE to go away, we just want it to see the facts about academic papers on the Internet and change its ways.

vitaminj• 15 years ago

Okay I'm not defending the IEEE, but I'd like to inject some data into this discussion. From their latest annual report, in 2010 their revenues and expenses from periodicals was $134.65m and $120.63m respectively.

Lord only knows how they spent $120m to curate a bunch of journals and magazines, but the $14m profit is less than what they earned in investment income ($25m).

ggchappell• 15 years ago

This is, I think, misleading. There is nothing unusual about IEEE copyright policies. Requiring copyright assignment is standard procedure for academic journals, with exceptions made for U.S. govt. works. As noted in the last paragraph, the American Mathematical Society bucks the trend (they "suggest", rather than require, copyright assignment), but they are a rarity.

Other than that, we have one person (the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager) who misunderstands the law and does not behave in a very friendly manner.

The above do not strike me as sufficient reasons for singling out the IEEE for blacklisting. If you want, blacklist everyone who puts publicly funded research behind paywalls. Or blacklist no one. But just the IEEE? That doesn't make sense.

wnight2• 15 years ago

Blacklist anyone who stands up for an exploitative policy. If the others wise up soon enough they may never get called on it.

loup-vaillant3• 15 years ago

In other words, hit the nail that stands out. This feels a bit totalitarian, but it might just work.

kragen4• 15 years ago

I believe Dan is blacklisting just the IEEE because no other publisher has yet refused to publish a paper of his on the grounds that it was in the public domain. I don't know how many publishers he has submitted public-domain papers to, but I imagine it's more than two.

SeanLuke3• 15 years ago

It's obvious that IEEE wouldn't accept such papers. Like any publisher, its business model is based on ownership of copyright. So this is a bit of a tempest in a teacup.

Instead, let me offer a more interesting factoid: to the best of my knowledge, in the United States, and probably in certain other countries, there is no such concept as a private individual dedicating a publication to the public domain.

Documents fall in public domain when the owners' copyrights have expired. For the federal government, the expiration is immediate. For everyone else, there is no legal mechanism for hastening a document's copyright expiration. [This is why it's foolish to "put software in the public domain". You haven't actually done anything at all.]

dsl2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure how a "factoid" can be prefixed with "to the best of my knowledge," but here is some cold hard fact for you:

A work can enter the public domain via expiration or forfeiture.

EDIT: A bit of clarification. Some people get confused because copyright actually affords you two different sets of rights: Economic rights, which everyone is pretty much on the same page about (once your work is in the public domain you can't charge for it later). You also get moral rights (right to attribution, right to maintain the integrity of you work, etc). These rights vary wildly by jurisdiction, but are rarely the ones that get argued when a work is in the public domain.

SeanLuke3• 15 years ago

> A work can enter the public domain via expiration or forfeiture.

Perhaps you could support this claim.

kkowalczyk• 15 years ago

1. re: Public Domain

Let's see:

a) random person on the internet (SeanLuke) says you can't dedicate your work to Public Domain

b) Creative Commons, which has a staff of lawyers, including very prominent and respected Lawrance Lessig: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Public_domain, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain

2. re: "obviousness". There's nothing "obvious" about IEEE's greed. The stated goal of IEEE is http://www.ieee.org/about/index.html:

"IEEE is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. IEEE and its members inspire a global community through IEEE's highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities."

The "obvious" thing, consistent with their stated mission would be to try to disseminate useful information to the largest number of people, like, say, Wikipedia or Khan Academy.

It's sad and shameful that they put profits above "advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity".

stan_rogers• 15 years ago

Bringing up the Creative Commons in this respect is sort of undermining your own argument. CC0[1] is a license acknowledging that, while it may be legally impossible to voluntarily and irrevocably extinguish copyright in works in which copyright naturally subsumes (putting a work into the public domain proper), as is the case in Canada under the Copyright Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42), to the extent possible under law, you make a grant of license equivalent to usage rights for works in the public domain. The results are similar, but the universal grant of license is revocable within the lifetime of the copyright (that is, the license may be withdrawn, and use after the withdrawal that is not ongoing from the period of the license would be subject to explicit grants of license).

SeanLuke3• 15 years ago

Downmodded for what I thought was a pretty factual comment posted under my own name. It appears that hackernews is becoming reddit.

So in response:

> b) Creative Commons, which has a staff of lawyers, including very prominent and respected Lawrance Lessig

As I understand it, Larry's position on this is controversial. There is no legal instrument in US copyright law to allow for public domain dedication, and specific parts of US copyright law essentially forbid it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_Sta... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Granting_work_into_th...

Larry Rosen (whom I hope you admit is no slouch when it comes to licensing) has this to say:

http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj16.htm

"Just as there is nothing in the law that permits a person to dump personal property in the public highway, there is nothing that permits the dumping of intellectual property into the public domain — except as happens in due course when any applicable copyrights expire. Until those copyrights expire, there is no mechanism in the law by which an owner of software can simply elect to place it in the public domain."

If you look carefully at the Creative Commons' CC0 license, and its associated documentation, you see that Creative Commons is fully aware that they're being... optimistic. See:

http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0 http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0_FAQ

Some quotes:

"Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute their works for public use before applicable copyright or database protection terms expire. Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily and reliably. Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to what rights are automatically granted and how and when they expire or may be voluntarily relinquished. More challenging yet, many legal systems effectively prohibit any attempt by these owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights, even when the author wishing to do so is well informed and resolute about doing so and contributing their work to the public domain."

and:

"CC0 helps solve this problem by giving creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law." [note the couching st the end]

and my personal favorite couching:

"While we can't be certain that all copyright and related rights will indeed be surrendered everywhere, we are confident that CC0 lets you sever the legal ties between you and your work to the greatest extent legally permissible."

> 2. re: "obviousness". There's nothing "obvious" about IEEE's greed. The stated goal of IEEE is http://www.ieee.org/about/index.html:

I didn't say it was good, or even moral. But to anyone who publishes papers with IEEE, or indeed most any other publisher, it is indeed obvious.

pyre2• 15 years ago

If you want more reading than just the links provided search for stuff related to SQLite. The source code was released to the Public Domain, and I believe that they have written about the various pitfalls of this (notably, you can't voluntarily dedicate a work to the public domain in Germany, IIRC).

derleth4• 15 years ago

According to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, "It is well settled that rights gained under the Copyright Act may be abandoned."

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1107173.html

So, who do I believe, someone going under an assumed name or the real court of law?

(By the way, that decision also calls Duke Nukem 3D "very cool".)

kragen4• 15 years ago

> to the best of my knowledge, in the United States, and probably in certain other countries, there is no such concept as a private individual dedicating a publication to the public domain.

http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html says otherwise, backing it up with citations to court decisions and jury instructions. Dan, by the way, is no stranger to the courts; the legal battle he fought for a decade is the reason that you can export strong cryptographic software from the US today without registering as an arms dealer and getting approval for each download.

Your comment is full of other errors. The IEEE, for example, is not a business. There are others I cannot be bothered to correct at this moment.

drats• 15 years ago

So no papers from Princeton?[1]

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3046651

frazerb• 15 years ago

I just struggle to understand how IEEE's publication policy contributes to "advancing technological innovation [..] for the benefit of humanity".

IEEE publication policy is nothing but a barrier to innovation.

Shame WikiLeaks / anonymous / whoever couldn't help us all out here.

michael_dorfman3• 15 years ago

The ACM recently published an editorial in the CACM explaining the reasons behind this policy.

Here is a brief excerpt:

By owning exclusive publication rights to articles, ACM is able to develop salable publication products that sustain its top-quality publishing programs and services; ensure access to organized collections by current and future generations of readers; and invest continuously in new titles and in services like referrer-linking, profiling, and metrics, which serve the community. Furthermore, it allows ACM to efficiently clear rights for the creation, dissemination, and translation of collections of articles that benefit the computing community that would be impossible if individual authors or their heirs had to be contacted for permission. Ownership of copyright allows ACM to pursue cases of plagiarism. The number of these handled has been steadily growing; some 20 cases were handled by ACM in the last year. Having ACM investigate and take action removes this burden from our authors, and ACM is more likely to obtain a satisfactory outcome (for example, having the offending material removed from a repository) than an individual.

Personally, I gladly pay money every year to the ACM and the IEEE, as I feel I get excellent value for it. I don't begrudge them their business model, and I don't think there is anything particularly nefarious about their copyright policy (which explicitly allows authors to post freely available copies of their articles for non-commercial purposes.)

maurits• 15 years ago

Sorry, but I couldn't disagree more.

Quality comes from the authors and the volunteers who peer review submissions, not from copyright

Plagiarism, or detection of (academic) plagiarism has very little to do with copyright. Academics has it own set of instruments to prove that somebody lifted an idea or result with out attribution and to deal with said situation, and they all do not need any copyright rule.

michael_dorfman3• 15 years ago

Quality comes from the authors and the volunteers who peer review submissions, not from copyright

This is true. But that does not mean that the publisher provides minimal value; it's worth remembering that Knuth lobbied hard to get the Journal of Algorithms moved from Elsevier to the ACM (where it became TALG) due to issues of copyright and pricing.

The ACM (and IEEE) are miles above the commercial publishers in this regard.

Plagiarism, or detection of (academic) plagiarism has very little to do with copyright.

The ACM says otherwise, and they are the ones who are actually pursuing cases. I tend to take their word for it.

raphman• 15 years ago

Valuable point. I'm not sure if I agree with the "excellent value". However, at least ACM tries to be reasonably fair. Recently they seem to have introduced a clause in the copyright transfer from which allows you to retain copyright for specific figures in your paper. Still a far way from Open Access but way better than all other major publishers. What I really hate about publishers like Elsevier or Springer is that they claim to add value by ensuring only high-quality papers get published. In reality, every major publisher, except ACM, seems to be perfectly happy with publishing a lot of rubbish research.

(My favorite: El Naschie's photo gallery in Elsevier's Chaos, Solitons and Fractals: www.el-naschie.net/bilder/file/Photo-Gallery.pdf)

michael_dorfman3• 15 years ago

When I look at the quality and quantity of journals in the archives that I get access to for a couple hundred bucks a year, I'm flabbergasted. I only wish there was something similar for the Humanities-- I'd pay in a heartbeat for that.

Elsevier and Springer's pricing, in contrast, is extortionate.

ahi• 15 years ago

I had look up El Naschie: http://elnaschiewatch.blogspot.com/2010/05/concise-introduct...

A while back Elsevier was caught publishing fake journals for pharmaceutical companies. Classy bunch.

nodata• 15 years ago

So these ACM people are legit? I get tons of junk mail from them and I don't even live in the States.

brainid• 15 years ago

"I don't think there is anything particularly nefarious about their copyright policy (which explicitly allows authors to post freely available copies of their articles for non-commercial purposes.)"

This is no longer strictly true as of last year. IEEE now explicitly forbids authors from posting the officially published versions of papers. You can post preprints though, which are often better since it includes content you had to cut to avoid huge over-length charges, and any errata or updates.

Every year I struggle with whether to renew my IEEE membership, whether to continue to publish in their journals, and whether to review for those journals.

X4• 15 years ago

Seriously can you please answer me, why someone who is so smart to have a Dr. degree or other title would be willing to work for free, or even pay for it??

I really don't understand it, what is special about IEEE. Why do Scientists send their papers or findings to IEEE etc. instead of just publishing it? Seriously, can someone please give me an insightfull answer to this?

If you answer with, nobody has been able to to code system x, that makes IEEE so special and unique, then it's not valid point I think. Because there are enough developers who could pull out a P2P Scientific Document store in a matter of days.

Heck, if someone writes text that he think is valuable and is willing to share it with the public domain, why doesn't he just upload it to say: P2P Networks, Cloudstorages or anything else that helps in this matter?

noneTheHacker• 15 years ago

> Seriously can you please answer me, why someone who is so smart to have a Dr. degree or other title would be willing to work for free, or even pay for it??

I think this video will answer that question for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

I don't have an answer to the rest of your questions but I think that video will answer your first question pretty well.

abrahamsen• 15 years ago

The majority of university research depends on external funding. In order to get funding, you as many published papers in high ranking journals.

You get zero credit for self-published papers, or papers in non-ranked journals.

So a researchers will always look after the highest ranked journal that is likely to publish a particular result. Issues of copyright get no regard and accessibility gets very little. Copyright ownership won't get you funding. Accessibility might get you more citations (which also affects ranking), but most citations come from other University researchers, who have access anyway through their libraries.

scott_s• 15 years ago

Why do Scientists send their papers or findings to IEEE etc. instead of just publishing it?

Research is only taken seriously if it's published in a respected, peer-reviewed venue. For some fields in CS, this is mostly ACM and IEEE conferences. The more theoretical sides of CS tend towards the journals.

desaiguddu• 15 years ago

I applied this logic.. ! My Original paper is with IEEE copyright. But I made that Paper public on my blog with IEEE copyright.

http://dndcaptcha.blogspot.com/2010/04/textareaid.html

If a person wants to buy a paper he can buy from IEEE, but a person just want to refer the paper with all details he can freely do so from my Blog website.

I don't know whether its a right approach or not? But I didn't wanted my research to just sit in some Publishers Library.

If we publish more work in public , we get more people involve in to those research work. :)

nickcobb• 15 years ago

This was published 5 years ago?

IEEE Refuses to Accept Public-Domain Papers?

Related Stories