Donna Hughes is a University of Rhode Island (URI) expert on international sex trafficking in women and children. URI recently removed two of her articles on this subject from the URI web server when a London law firm threatened to sue her for defaming an unnamed UK man and unnamed UK woman whom Hughes had described as traffickers. The articles are still available through the journals that originally published them, National Review Online (Fall 2002) and Vital Speeches of the Day (January 2003). For more details, see Robin Wilson, Professor Says U. of Rhode Island Wants to Censor Her Research Instead of Defending It in Court, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 7, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers).
Excerpt: Frank Annunziato, Executive Director of the URI chapter of the American Association of University Professors, "said the case should be a wake-up call to academics who post articles online. With journals printed in the United States, he said, authors are protected by the First Amendment. But that may not be the case for articles published online and downloaded in other countries, where judges have allowed foreigners to pursue lawsuits against American citizens and institutions in courts where the First Amendment does not apply. 'Professors think that we have the First Amendment here and that that's a defense against defamation,' he said. 'But in the Internet world, that may not count.' " (PS: Annunziato is right. In the US, because authors are protected by the First Amendment, defamation plaintiffs must prove that defamatory statements are false. In the UK, in part because there is no First Amendment, defamatory statements are presumed false and the burden is on the defendant to prove them true.)
(PS: Offline publications also reach other jurisdictions with lower protections for freedom of speech, so this is not a problem that only affects online publications. But it does affect online publications and the problem won't go away until the rules about national jurisdiction over online speech (especially defamation and hate speech) are not only settled, but settled in a way that doesn't permit cross-border censorship and reduce the worldwide standard to the standard of the least-free countries.)
Update. In the July 1 Chronicle, Isolde Raferty reports that Hughes has been allowed to repost her articles to the URI web site. "In May, after the American Association of University Professors and the Rhode Island branch of the American Civil Liberties Union pressured the university to allow Ms. Hughes to repost her articles, the university released guidelines laying out what material was appropriate for its Web sites run by faculty members. Ms. Hughes, arguing that her articles fell within the guidelines, asked the university again to make a decision about her material. She said she intended to repost the articles on the Web site....In a letter on Monday to...Hughes, the university's president, Robert L. Carothers, wrote that the articles were 'protected by the university's firm commitment to academic freedom.' "
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/07/2004 09:45:00 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.
