Comment by 10ren | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 10ren | Hacker News Reader

The US had lax copyright early on. It makes sense for a net importer of IP. It's a great way to catch up. But what about the originators of the industrial revolution? Would they have done even better without copyright? I don't know, but the industrial boom in Germany isn't evidence of it.

An interesting present day case is the ACM charging for academic papers. Some papers are available from the author's website for free, but some are not. Although the fee is affordable (around $20-30), do publications that are free lead to better propagation and thus more/better research?

I think it's very hard to judge this, because I think what happens in practice is that unknown academics give away their papers - it helps them to get known. Whereas the ones that you have to pay for are the massively famous ones with (eg) 700+ citations. Their knowledge is already out there in the community, and their reputation probably further promotes their research much more than the small fee retards it. In addition to this, you're probably better off reading a free review/summary/interpretation of the famous work than reading it in the original - so the ideas keep promulgating.

The ones that aren't on the author's website are mostly the ones whose authors aren't active on the internet at all. Of course, papers become more highly cited over time, and authors die and retire, so many of the most famous papers are in this state.

Traditionally, journals would send a few printed copies to the author so that the author could send them to people who wrote them asking for a copy, a custom that continues to some extent today. Putting the final version of the paper on your web site is simply an extension of this approach.

Copyright is pretty much irrelevant as an incentive for production of academic work. In nearly all fields, authors don't get paid by journals for writing papers. In many cases, in fact, they have to pay for the privilege of writing those papers. Academic books aren't net cash-flow negatives in the same way as journal and conference papers, but the total earnings per hour are very low.

In academic publishing, copyright has historically served as an incentive for printing academic work. Given our new methods of printing, using laser printers and computer screens, that incentive is no longer relevant. The main issue today is to prevent the last copy of an old paper from being lost, and ensure that it can be found easily so that it can be copied. Libraries are better suited to these purposes than printing companies. Copyright in its current form is a serious menace to that kind of preservation.

Non-academic publishing may be a different ballgame, of course. I don't know.

From the selfish viewpoint of the researcher, open access seems to be generally considered to increase citations and the general impact of a published paper:

http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

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