Science must “push copyright aside”
par Richard M. Stallman
This article appeared in Nature Webdebates in 2001
Il devrait être évident pour tout un chacun que la littérature scientifique est faite pour diffuser les connaissances scientifiques, et que les revues scientifiques existent pour faciliter ce travail. Par conséquent les règles d'utilisation de la littérature scientifique devraient être de nature à aider à atteindre cet objectif.
The rules we have now, known as copyright, were established in the age of the printing press, an inherently centralized method of mass-production copying. In a print environment, copyright on journal articles restricted only journal publishers—requiring them to obtain permission to publish an article—and would-be plagiarists. It helped journals to operate and disseminate knowledge, without interfering with the useful work of scientists or students, either as writers or readers of articles. These rules fit that system well.
The modern technology for scientific publishing, however, is the World Wide Web. What rules would best ensure the maximum dissemination of scientific articles, and knowledge, on the Web? Articles should be distributed in nonproprietary formats, with open access for all. And everyone should have the right to “mirror” articles—that is, to republish them verbatim with proper attribution.
Ces règles devraient s'appliquer aussi bien aux anciens articles qu'aux nouveaux, lorsqu'ils sont diffusés sous forme électronique. Mais il n'y a pas de nécessité vitale à modifier le système actuel de droits d'auteur en ce qui concerne la publication des revues sur papier parce qu'il n'y a pas de problème dans ce domaine.
Unfortunately, it seems that not everyone agrees with the truisms that began this article. Many journal publishers appear to believe that the purpose of scientific literature is to enable them to publish journals so as to collect subscriptions from scientists and students. Such thinking is known as “confusion of the means with the ends”.
Leur approche consiste à restreindre l'accès à la simple consultation de la littérature scientifique à ceux qui veulent et peuvent payer pour cela. Ils utilisent le droit d'auteur, qui est toujours en vigueur malgré son inadaptation aux réseaux informatiques, comme excuse pour dissuader les scientifiques de choisir de nouvelles règles.
For the sake of scientific cooperation and humanity's future, we must reject that approach at its root—not merely the obstructive systems that have been instituted, but the mistaken priorities that inspired them.
Journal publishers sometimes claim that online access requires expensive high-powered server machines, and that they must charge access fees to pay for these servers. This “problem” is a consequence of its own “solution.” Give everyone the freedom to mirror, and libraries around the world will set up mirror sites to meet the demand. This decentralized solution will reduce network bandwidth needs and provide faster access, all the while protecting the scholarly record against accidental loss.
Les éditeurs disent aussi qu'il faut un accès payant pour rémunérer les rédacteurs. Admettons qu'il faille payer les rédacteurs; c'est l'arbre qui cache la forêt. Les frais de rédaction pour un article moyen varient entre 1% et 3% du coût nécessaire à la recherche qui l'a suscité. Un si petit pourcentage ne justifie pas que l'on fasse obstruction à l'utilisation des résultats.
Instead, the cost of editing could be recovered, for example, through page charges to the authors, who can pass these on to the research sponsors. The sponsors should not mind, given that they currently pay for publication in a more cumbersome way, through overhead fees for the university library's subscription to the journal. By changing the economic model to charge editing costs to the research sponsors, we can eliminate the apparent need to restrict access. The occasional author who is not affiliated with an institution or company, and who has no research sponsor, could be exempted from page charges, with costs levied on institution-based authors.
Another justification for access fees to online publications is to fund conversion of the print archives of a journal into online form. That work needs to be done, but we should seek alternative ways of funding it that do not involve obstructing access to the result. The work itself will not be any more difficult, or cost any more. It is self-defeating to digitize the archives and waste the results by restricting access.
The US Constitution says that copyright exists “to promote the progress of science”. When copyright impedes the progress of science, science must push copyright out of the way.