Hacker News Reader

Comment by isthatart | Hacker News Reader

As a EU researcher, reader and author, I ask: does this reform affect my use of arXiv or say figshare? Until now I don't have a clear answer.

View on HN

Unfortunately, the actual text isn't available yet, and now I can't seem to find the list of amendments I was reading earlier, but if I recall correctly, in both the original and proposed amendments, scholarly publications were considered not to be press publications and were not covered at all by the press publication protections.

The EU Parliament press release is also claiming that a number of non-commercial and "small" platforms will be excluded.

Thank you. Anybody who has any influence in the discussion, please help to make this clear. It is important for the researchers, I think. In this particular case arXiv is by no means "small" (has 1.4 million articles) but is non-commercial, What about Figshare which may classify as commercial? Other platforms?

IANAL but the way I read it, scientific, research and teaching resources are (to a degree) exempt.

What kind of effect do you think that these laws could have on your use of arXiv?

Example: article in arXiv gets later published in a journal. Will the arXiv article version be still available for anybody? Only for non-EU people? Will be removed from arXiv? None of these?

Why would any of that happen? I don't think the internet copyright proposal will affect things in a way you describe...

I'd like to see a discussion around these aspects. I see only cries re big platforms and news outlets.I'm neither of these.

Smaller platforms are exempted on the directive (ie, startups, single person corporations, etc.) as well as anything that doesn't do profit oriented content/active content moderation.

But arXiv is not small, it has 1.4 million e-prints, is far bigger than most of other scientific platforms. It is non-commercial though.

Why not? AFAIK about a 1/3 of the arXiv articles are later published in journals.

Why would you? The Link Tax and Upload Filter specifically affect service providers that moderate user content to generate profit, if you upload something with explicit consent of all rightholders then this is explicitly exempted from the directive.

So? They're not published there illegally, arXiv (AFAICT) is non-commercial and publishing similar content elsewhere does not retroactively make the existing content illegal.

Sure, they are not published illegally. IANAL but as I understand the process, is like this: the author submits to arXiv and either (a) gives arXiv a perpetual NON-EXCLUSIVE licence to distribute (which does not change the fact that the copyright is with the author) or (b) the author chooses a CC-BY licence. The author submits the article to Journal and after acceptance, may transfer the copyright to Journal. Is perfectly legal and it works like this for a significant part of the arXiv articles. See also here in the comments for cases when a revised version of the article from Journal is posted on arXiv. But now, with the new EU Copyright Directive, how will this delicate process interact with the dumb one-size-fits-all automatic filters which may detect (wrongly) that the article on arXiv infringes the copyright of the Journal. What if arXiv will receive a bombardment of requests from various Journals? What will they do? They are admirable but they don't have the surface to fight this ddossing from journals. Or maybe my concerns are void, I'd be very happy if this is the case.

> What if arXiv will receive a bombardment of requests from various Journals?

Why are journals not sending a bombardment of requests already? Why would they start now?

How does this law change anything? Are you distributing now via arXiv preprints despite not being legally allowed to do so?

Oh I replied to another comment. The answer is "no". Fact is that 1/3 (anyway a significant proportion which can be referenced) of the arXiv articles appear later in journals. So it is a totally credible concern. The arXiv has a system of copyrights which allow them either a perpetual non-exclusive dissemination right, or a CC-BY copyright.

Depending on the journal and its licensing agreement, they may not even accept manuscripts which have been circulated as preprints. Some of them will allow you to publish the corrections made through the review process. Some of them will even allow you to distribute the final article as published. But this is essentially unrelated to the law being discussed.

Well in mathematics and physics the usual thing to do is to first post on arXiv and then submit to the journal. ArXiv references are totally allowed. I heard that the situation is different in other fields but as you say this is not relevant for this discussion.

Two more examples examples for arXiv and one for Figshare. (1) Article in journal has a flaw. For some reason the journal is slow or unhelpful concerning a correct version, so the author posts on arXiv a revised and perhaps much bigger version. Filters (will these be on arXiv?) detect a copyright infringement. (2) I translate an Euler article and post it on arXiv (with all attributions). Or an English translation of an obscure German or Russian article by a great mathematician. (3) I post on Figshare (and GitHub?) the meat of a published article (like data, procedures, results of experiments, programs) in order to make the research Open Science. I explain the context but maybe I don't pass the automated filter which detects a copyright infringement. For all examples, same questions as before.

If something was a copyright violation yesterday, it will still be a copyright violation tomorrow. And vice versa.

If you fear that arXiv will implement filters that will recognize that what you are uploading is a translation of an obscure Prussian research paper and block the upload, I don't think that's going to happen. (But I will be really impressed if it happens!)

But what if it is not a copyright violation but it looks like one to some dumb filter? For say 0.5 million articles from arXiv?

Then the dumb filter (if one is put in place at all) will be tuned to be less dumb, I guess.

apparently, arxiv will have to implement a filter that stops you from posting figures or excerpts from elsevier's journals for example ?

Right, will arXiv implement such filters? Same question for other green or gold OA platforms. We all know about Elsevier, but if I put my paranoid hat then for gold OA this is even more perverse, will they try to kill green OA (not that I believe in this failed classification which separates between green "repositories" for archiving and gold publication platforms). Anyway arXiv is a monument which has to be protected from this madness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com