[Axiom-developer] Paper usage policy (for authors)

[C Y]

--- William Sit <address@hidden> wrote:

> There is one problem: I do not know whether copyright (by
> Journal of Symbolic Computation) may be violated if large
> chunks of my paper is reproduced on the web.

Hard to say - I think this is the place to start:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/copyright

One item on the "rights the author retains" list gives hope:

"the right to prepare other derivative works, to extend the article
into book-length form, or to otherwise re-use portions or excerpts in
other works, with full acknowledgement of its original publication in
the journal."

Whether pamphlets qualify is probably a question for a lawyer.

I'm assuming anyone other than the original author has no special
rights period.

This is why I think the logical approch to take for pamphlets on
subjects where we have no legal right to the original source material
is to write our own review paper in the process, outlining the key
points and weaving the original papers' ideas together into a whole
(which is also the point of the CAS code, after all - at least for the
well established mathematical work that will probably form the focus of
most of our literate efforts for the first few years.)  What to do
about original work without a larger body of literate is somewhat less
clear, although I think in most cases an article appropriate for
inclusion as a pamphlet will have to be slightly different from a
typical research article.  (More background, context, etc.)

Hopefully, we can eventually make Axiom a driver for free availability
of new publications in mathematical research via some sort of Axiom
journal.  If the goal is truly to spread knowledge and learn, expensive
commercial journals and their per-article or subscription fees present
a barrior to that goal.  (Certainly I feel it, not being at a major
university - there are ways but especially for older papers tracking
them down can be extremely difficult.  We want knowledge to be easily
accessible.  It's hard enough to get people to want to learn - why make
it any harder when they actually do try to learn?)  I view this as a
secondary goal of pamphlets - if Axiom is structured correctly, the
pamphlets should eventually constitute a very high quality, complete
description of the mathematical landscape that is freely available to
everyone (which just incidently happens to have running CAS code to let
you immediately apply those same ideas).

I think the Axiom project might be a bit like the Free Software
Foundation in that respect - to me at least it's about more than just a
working CAS.  It's about changing the landscape itself.  Not replacing
the academic institutions and their work as they exist today, but
making them more visible and more readily applicable to the rest of the
world.  That's a more ambitious project than just a working CAS, but
the potential rewards are even greater.

The analogy I have always liked is the advancement of transportation. 
Take traveling west in the US, for example - people started doing it in
covered wagons because that was quicker and easier for them than
building anything better.  But soon, people built railways that
dramatically improved just about everything where travel was concerned.
 It made all sorts of things possible that were impossible before. 
Same with the US highway system - two lane roads will get you there,
but superhighways will do it faster and much more quickly.  For an
individual car, it makes more sense to use what is already there.  When
many people rely on something, it's worth doing right even at the
expense of greater up front cost and work.  Hopefully Axiom will prove
to be an enabler for new types of mathematical research and and new
levels of rigor and speed.  That's worth doing right, even if we have
to spend the time to make the infrastructure to make it possible first.

Cheers,
CY


      
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