The November 6 issue of Nature is running two stories on legal troubles that might plague arXiv, the most used preprint exchange in all the fields of science and scholarsihp. The stories are accessible only to subscribers.
(1) The first (Defamation online) is an unsigned editorial noting that an article by CERN physicist Alvaro De Rújula, posted to arXiv on October 27, accuses Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal, of "claiming credit for other researchers' ideas". In the US, this would only be libellous if false, but in the UK it might be libellous even if true. Moreover, in the UK both the archive and the author might be liable, even though the archive does not read or approve the articles it hosts. In the OA movement, we usually distinguish archive deposits from true "publications", but any kind of exposure to third parties counts as "publication" for the purposes of defamation law. The editorial is accompanied by a short note by Jim Giles (Critical comments threaten to open libel floodgate for physics archive) reporting that arXiv founder Paul Ginsparg would remove a defamatory paper from the archive if advised by a lawyer to do so. Quoting Ginsparg: "ArXiv is just a mindless redistribution system. It's not implemented to be a global police force to detect or enforce professional ethics."
(2) The second (Preprint server seeks way to halt plagiarists by Jim Giles) reports that 22 papers by Ramy Naboulsi were recently removed from the archive when some were discovered to be plagiarized. They were removed by the colleague who had submitted them to arXiv under the good-faith but mistaken belief that they were original. However, Paul Ginsparg is exploring ways to block plagiarized articles in the future by using software to measure the similarity of new submissions to articles already in the collection. Quoting Fintan Culwin, an expert in anti-plagiarism software at London’s South Bank University: "The technology is there. The question is how much does the archive want to pay to have this service."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/10/2003 11:41:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
