Out of the Way 英文参考文献.docVIP

Community Page Out of the Way How the next copyright revolution can help the next scienti?c revolution Glenn Otis Brown W hen did calling a lawyer become part of the scienti?c process? It hasn’t of?cially, of course. But as a generation of researchers has grudgingly come to know, navigating the legal red tape of universities, corporations, and publishers is an inevitable part of the practice. Whether seeking access to information or sharing one’s own ?ndings with others, scientists increasingly ?nd themselves having to ask an intermediary’s permission. This “ask ?rst’’ culture has developed at just the moment when technology has opened vast new possibilities for collaboration and information- sharing. The timing is not coincidental. Policymakers, under the in?uence of lobbies defending pre-digital business models, have reacted to new technology with ever more extreme intellectual property laws. The result is a legal regime tailored to a powerful minority but ill-suited to a number of other constituencies—scientists and scholars chief among them—that thrive on openness. Worries over broad notions of “piracy’’ and “asset management’’ have insinuated themselves into ?elds where those terms, until recently, held no meaning. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is at the vanguard of a growing cross- disciplinary movement to counteract this trend by demonstrating that voluntary models of open publishing are not only viable, but crucial to scienti?c innovation. Yet PLoS’ goal of “immediate, unrestricted access to scienti?c ideas, methods, results, and conclusions’’ is not immediately compatible with the stringent rules of copyright, which apply fully and automatically to all published works, by default. The exercise of something less than full copyright requires, oddly, some legal tinkering—which is where Creative Commons, the organization I help manage, comes in. Creative Commons, a 501(c)(3) nonpro?t corporation based at derivative works; or a “share-alike’’ provision