Fair Use Madness

I don't know if you caught this story, but one of our fellow bloggers here at ScienceBlogs, Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle, was threatened with legal action when she reproduced a figure from a published paper in one of her blog posts. The original post is here (now with the figure removed).

She has posted her correspondence with the journal here (the journal in question is Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture owned by Wiley). Happily the issue has been resolved -- apparently one of their junior staff members was somewhat overzealous -- but the argument also resulted in staff members at Wiley receiving numerous threatening emails.

In the meantime, everyone is talking about this in the context of fair use. Some commenters and bloggers have called for a boycott of Wiley journals, and Shelley has asked for a day of posting on Fair Use.

What to make of all this madness?

I completely support Shelley. I regularly copy figures from articles and reprint them on this blog because I believe that to do so is good for everyone. It is good for the authors of the article (brings them publicity), good for the journals that publish those articles (same reason), and good for science as a whole (by publicizing and explaining new research).

I don't reprint the entire article or even a small fraction of it. Likewise, it wasn't like Shelley was reprinting every figure. She just selected the most important figure.

Further, in many cases these papers would receive no publicity whatsoever without the help of bloggers. And on top of that, this article was advertised in a press release -- presumably with the intention of drawing attention to it. We are helping the journals do their job, not hindering it.

Finally -- though I am by no means an expert in this area -- I am not even certain that posting a correctly cited figure from a first author paper constitutes copyright infringement.

All those arguments taken together suggest to me that the journal over-reacted big time. (Again it does look like they recognized the error and retracted it.)

I am completely willing to believe that this incident was caused by a misunderstanding -- largely resulting from the fact that I don't think publishers entirely know what to do with blogs. However, in the future, I hope that we can avoid conflicts of this nature. It is to everyone's benefit that we do.

UPDATE: I don't have time to follow all the blog reactions, but fortunately A Blog Around the Clock is doing an excellent job.