Plausible Accuracy

A few weeks ago, I saw (and blogged about) a video from a talk at MIT on Open Access.  In it the vice president of Science Commons, John Wilbanks, gave a very interesting overview of why Open Access is such a great thing and some of the ways Science Commons is attempting to build on and leverage information which is free.

A couple of times in the talk, however, he put up some text from a scientific paper, and made a comment that I thought was a bit odd when I first heard it.  To paraphrase, he says something to the effect of “I don’t really see how this is a creative work.  There aren’t too many ways you can rewrite this and have it retain the same meaning”.  Perhaps it’s a sign of how little exposure I’ve had to the laws in the domain of copyright protections, but it took me a bit before I understood why he was saying this.  The reason, of course, is that only “creative works” are considered to be under the jurisdiction of copyright laws.  By attempting to frame scientific papers as something other than creative works, he was implicating that they should not be governed by copyright law.

I have to say that I strongly empathize with the goals of the Open Access movement, but I also strongly disagree with the idea that papers are not creative works.Anyone who has read scientific papers will tell you that there are, as in any form of communication, nearly infinite ways to write something which conveys an idea or result.  We’ve all read poorly written papers, and (not to brag) I’ve often been complimented on my writing by advisers.  There is also the specific order the results are presented in, the figures (often creative works, especially when presenting, for instance, a protein structure which must be rendered in some manner), etc.

Of course the content of the paper is defined and bounded by the actual experimental results.  What creative work is not influenced and shaped in some fashion by the starting material?  This is the beauty of a good paper - that one can take a rather straightforward fact of “Experiment X gave result Y and it means Z” and expand that into an interesting and nuanced description of the data.  If papers weren’t creative works, why would there be multiple rounds of revisions prior to publication, with feedback from the experimentors, advising professors, reviewers, editors, etc?  If there is only “one way” you can write it, then it shouldn’t need all of this tweaking, right?

Perhaps I’m being too simplistic in my reasoning.  As I said before, I completely understand the desire to classify scientific writing as something other than a creative work, as a relatively straightforward way to get to the Open Access goal of freedom of information.  Unfortunately I don’t think that insulting the people who generate the information is the best way to go about endearing them to the movement.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 11:27 am and is filed under copyright, open science, practice of science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.