Intro to Copyright, Part One: Why Copyright Matters

Note: The main audience for this blog post is people who work in research and write papers (hence the “we”), but anyone is welcome to read it. For context, I’m writing as someone who used to work in academia and did my fair share of research projects and coauthored my fair share of papers, so this is from one (former) academic researcher to another/addressed to peers. 

Terms and conditions. (Seemingly) nobody reads them. But did you know that you’re signing your rights away to your work when you click “I agree” to that publishing contract?

We spend a lot of time perfecting techniques and analyzing our data for rigor and making sure the science is up to par. Shouldn’t we inspect our copyright agreements with the same rigor? After all, we spend months and years on research projects, and reading a copyright agreement takes less than that (it’s never taken me more than a few hours). By the same token, after months or years of toiling on a research project, it’s understandable to just hit that button and be done. Signing the terms and conditions seems like a necessary evil, an afterthought, one second to get out of your day. But in that one second, something permanent happens: the publishing company becomes the legal owner of your words. 

Buried in those paragraphs of legalese is an arcane set of rules and agreements where you agree to give your work to a publisher, most likely Elsevier, Springer, or one of the big names. You and your team no longer own it; your institution doesn't; the funding agency doesn't either; the public doesn't. The work that you submitted to the company for free and spent a lot of time and care over is now going to a multibillion or multimillion dollar enterprise whose boardroom most likely does not give a flying toss about science or patient wellbeing, or at least not as much as they care about money. 

I’ll admit that I skipped over the terms and conditions for the first few years when I was working in research. But then I started reading them. And to be honest, it was demoralizing. I had worked a ton on a project and reading the terms and conditions, it was like, “[Publisher A] will own everything.” (It then turned out that since my PI had signed an open access agreement, we basically bought back our work, so they did not in fact own anything. But we had to pay $4k to make it happen/to get it back.)

In full disclosure, I was not a happy camper signing over my rights to the work to this company. Did I tell anyone? No (sorry to my PIs reading this!). I admittedly did it because we wanted to publish in this one journal and it was a good place to publish on the scientific end of things (on the business end of things, we had to pay them a couple thousand dollars to make our work immediately available to the public … funny how that works). I was like, “If I’m going to sign away my work, I’m going to know what I’m getting into.” Another time I saw that a journal I was submitting an article to was owned by Elsevier, and I didn’t want to sign my rights away to Elsevier, so I took my name off the paper. Do I regret taking my name off? Sometimes. But to be honest I just didn’t want to ink an agreement with Elsevier unless I really had to.

It’s common to feel powerless when it comes to these agreements and the business or financial side of research or when you’re dealing with these systems that are, in the words of digital scholar Sam Moore and a member of leadership from Author’s Alliance, extractive. But there are some things you can control. 

Ideally, the time to read terms and conditions is before you’ve submitted your article to a journal. In full disclosure, I’ve never done this, so this is me listing out what I wish I’d done. I think that the terms and conditions of the publisher and who the publisher is, etc, should be a key part of the conversation when it comes to deciding where to publish, alongside the scientific aspects of the journal that are already rightly discussed (e.g. if it publishes research that aligns with your topic and if it’s a legit journal). And everyone should be part of it. And if there’s someone not on the author list who has a stake in the paper, maybe you should add them. 

Set and communicate boundaries. Who are you willing to do business with and give your work to? Your work is valuable, not just in the intangible sense and in the amount of time spent on it, but it’s valuable to publishers in the financial sense, so much so that they make us (more precisely, the PI or lead researcher) pay them thousands of dollars for us to keep the rights (that’s “gold open access” for you). And decide if you’re willing to pay up. If it essentially feels like ransom, that’s because it is, in the intellectual property sense.

If you don’t like the terms and conditions, then don’t publish with that journal, or negotiate with them for better terms and conditions on your paper (see below). And you can always yank your paper from the journal if you get to the big “terms and conditions” screen and you don’t like what you see. It's not a fun possibility, but a possibility nonetheless. Even though it might seem small, you have a say, and your say matters.