Skip to content

Blogging scientific papers and copyright [UPDATED]

January 26, 2012

Go take a look at this post from Simon Wellings at the blog Metageologist about using images from journal articles for blog posts. He did some digging to find out what the actual policies are for a few different journals in geosciences. Unsurprisingly, most publishers do not allow re-posting of figures/illustrations from papers without paying a fee. The Geological Society of London (GSL), however, has a different policy:

I happen to belong to the Geological Society of London and the particular diagram I am dying to copy is in their journal. A quick and helpful twitter response from them pointed me to their publications permissions page. All is well! With acknowledgement, I can use up to three figures without permission and up to 100 words.

This seems like a decent way to go. People are permitted to use some of the content but can’t simply reproduce the entire journal article on their site. From my experience, this is aligned with the goals of blogging scientists anyway — we want to highlight one or two aspects of the paper that we find interesting and show a couple figures that best communicate that. Publishers need to know that we aren’t running these sites as some black market depot of scientific papers. We want to discuss the science! In fact, when we blog about a paper we provide a link to it, which may drive more people to download and read the whole paper.

I doubt the very large publishers would adopt a policy like GSL. But, I’d really love to see Earth science organizations like the American Geophysical Union (AGU), Geological Society of America (GSA), and Society for Sedimentary Geology (SEPM), all of which have numerous well-read and widely cited journals, have an official policy that allowed for limited reproduction of their content on personal blogs/websites.

The trend of researchers discussing and hashing out details of their science in online venues (in addition, not as a replacement, to conferences and peer review) is only going to increase in the coming years. Having your paper talked about is what we all want. It means more and different researchers might see our work and potentially cite it. These scientific organizations should get ahead of this trend. If my peers are permitted to reproduce some of my published work on their blog — whether its to prop it up or to challenge it — I’m going to be more inclined to submit my work to those journals.

UPDATE: In response to this post, GSA pointed me to their revised copyright policy. You can read the whole thing on their page, but I’ll highlight the ‘fair use’ section:

If you want to use a single figure, a brief paragraph, or a single table from a GSA publication, GSA considers this to be fair usage, and you need no formal permission and no fees are assessed unless you or your publisher require a formal permission letter. In that case, you should print a copy of this document and present it to your publisher.

An author has the right to use his or her article or a portion of the article in a thesis or dissertation without requesting permission from GSA, provided the bibliographic citation and the GSA copyright credit line are given on the appropriate pages.

This is somewhat close to GSL’s policy, although only a single figure or single table is allowed by GSA. For the shorter papers in Geology this is pretty good because there’s typically only a couple of figures in those papers anyway. Perhaps allowing 2 or 3 figures from the much longer and more data-rich papers that are published in GSA Bulletin, for example, would be a welcome revision to the policy. But, all in all, this is a good development. I’d like to thank GSA for responding so quickly (in a few hours!) and with genuine interest about how best to serve their members.

UPDATE 2: Also see the comment below from Howard Harper, the director of Society of Sedimentary Geology (SEPM), with a draft of their revised permission statement regarding usage of content on personal websites/blogs.

Austral parakeets in the early morning

January 25, 2012

[This post is primarily a test of sharing/viewing videos from Vimeo]

Here’s a very short video I took while doing field work in Patagonia in 2005. It’s early in the morning, the sun is still behind the ridge, so the lighting is poor. Make sure you have your volume up so you can hear these birds. They are Austral parakeets, which are fairly common in this part of Chilean Patagonia.

Some housekeeping and thoughts about the future of this blog

January 22, 2012

Now that I’m back here on the old blog I’ve got a bit of housekeeping to attend to.

Sidebar

In an effort to keep the site clean and easy to read, I’ve simplified the sidebar to the right. There are so many geoscience blogs now (this is a good thing!) that there’s no way I’m going to spend the time to maintain a list of them all here. I’ve got the automated feed of the >100 geoscience-themed blogs from my GoogleReader list (called ‘The Latest From Other Geoscience Blogs’). Make sure to check out this list updated regularly by Ron Schott for the most comprehensive accounting of all the blogs out there. And then there is a ‘recent comments’ and my Twitter feed. That’s it, no other lists, widgets, and other stuff.

Pages

The pages (links up on the header) are essentially unchanged from the previous incarnation except for updating my affiliation information and links to my page at Virginia Tech. At some point in the future I’d like to add a page related to all the geologic photographs I’ve posted. There are a bunch that show sedimentary structures and other features that may be useful for those of you teaching intro classes or sedimentology courses. I’m not sure what the best way is to do this — if anyone has any ideas, please comment below.

Archive

At some point I’ll move all the posts I wrote at Wired (September 2010-January 2012) over here to maintain continuity. Even when moved here there will surely be links within those posts that refer back to Wired. I will update some of those as I find them, but I won’t be fixing every single one of them.

Commenting

To comment here you can log in with WordPress, using your Twitter or Facebook login, or the standard name and e-mail (which won’t be displayed). Let me know if your comment doesn’t show up and I’ll try to fix it promptly.

Mobile/Tablet Viewing

People are increasingly reading web content on devices other than computers. The mobile version of this site (for iPhones, Androids, etc.) should automatically load and when I tried it the other day it looked pretty good. However, the platform for viewing WordPress blogs on an iPad (called ‘Onswipe’) is clunky and annoying in my opinion. I’ve disabled it (under Appearance > iPad on the WordPress dashboard). If that didn’t work and it’s still displaying, simply scroll to the bottom and there should be a link to view in standard format.

Ads

Although I have my own domain name, I’m using the free WordPress.com service for this blog. Since I was last blogging here they’ve started to include ads. So far, I’ve only seen ads at the bottom of some posts (between the content and the comment thread). The only way for this blog to be 100% ad-free would be for me to pay extra. For now I’m just going to wait and see how it goes, see how much it bothers me.

What Will I Blog About?

I don’t know yet. I will continue to show photographs from the field. It doesn’t take much time, it’s easy, I definitely have permission to do it (because they’re mine), and I really enjoy it. As I mentioned above, I’d like to come up with a nice way to organize all the photos so other educators/researchers can find and use them for their lectures or talks.

I’m going to hang up the ‘What Rocks’ series — the one where I highlighted and linked to five posts from the geoblogosphere every Monday. I’ll still link to the awesome stuff out there, just not in a regular series.

I’m pondering using this blog as a space to write more about the research in my field — the work my students and I are doing and what my peers are publishing. It will contain a lot of jargon and technical details and it probably won’t be accessible to a broad audience. It may contain stream-of-consciousness musings and only semi-coherent thoughts. And, because of the time it takes to do research, it may only be once every few months.

The number of people reading what I blog about will surely go down. That’s fine. For those that like labels, instead of ‘science blogging’, which includes outreach and broader science communication, perhaps this will be ‘scientific discipline blogging’ or ‘technical scientific blogging.’ Whatever. Obviously, the label doesn’t matter, but you get the picture.

See, I’m rambling already :)

Moving my blogging back to this site

January 20, 2012

I’m back on my old site here after a year and a half blogging for Wired Science.

Check out my post over at Wired if your curious why. It’ll be fun being back at the old site — it’s comfortable, like putting an old and real comfortable pair of shoes on.

Here’s the address for the RSS feed for this site: http://clasticdetritus.com/feed/

Friday Field Foto #123: Sometimes you need to cross a river

September 3, 2010

This week’s Friday Field Foto doesn’t show any geology — but shows what a geologist must sometimes do to get to the rocks. In this case, I think we are on our way back from spending several days staying at the base of and climbing the mountain in the background on the right. Good times.

Crossing the Rio Zamora, southern Chile (© 2010 clasticdetritus.com)

Happy Friday!

Mud flow caught on video

September 2, 2010

This video has already made the rounds the last couple days (e.g., Geofroth and Geotripper) but I couldn’t resist posting it here. The large truck offers both scale and an illustration of the power of moving mud.

As far as I know the video was first posted here.

Writing in the geoblogosphere (week of August 23-29, 2010)

August 30, 2010

This week-in-review idea continues to evolve so bear with me. To help focus what I put in this weekly digest I’m going to highlight posts that include some interesting writing. I’m also going to limit myself to five:

-

~~~~

-

List of most recent week-in-review posts: http://clasticdetritus.com/category/week-in-review/

Sea-Floor Sunday #72: Indus submarine canyon

August 29, 2010

The ongoing flooding of the Indus River in Pakistan inspired me to search for an image of the Indus submarine canyon for this week’s Sea-Floor Sunday image. The image below is from this website describing a research cruise in 2008-2009 that acquired multibeam bathymetry data and cores. Check out the site for more details about the study.

The purple colors are deeper water and nicely show the sinuous canyon. The canyon is between 1 and 2 km wide and up to 1,100 m (~3,600 ft) deep. The tight meander bends remind me of this place. This submarine canyon feeds the enormous Indus submarine fan, which is 1500 km (900 mi) long and 960 km (575 mi) wide, second only to the Bengal submarine fan in size.

Bathymetry of Indus submarine canyon (credit: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~wpg008/PelagiaIndusCruise.html)

Here’s a zoomed-out map from Google Earth for context.

Friday Field Foto #122: Channelized Miocene strata, Tierra del Fuego

August 27, 2010

This week’s Friday Field Foto is from some Miocene beach-cliff exposures on the Atlantic coast of Tierra del Fuego. These sandstones are characterized by a mix of ‘normal’ turbidites thick successions of traction-dominated (including large climbing dunes) deposits. Also note the surface cutting down from left to right in upper part of cliff — a nice erosional surface, which is overlain by mostly thin-bedded, fine-grained strata.

Miocene sedimentary rocks, Tierra del Fuego coast (© 2010 clasticdetritus.com)

Happy Friday!

Getting back into the swing of things

August 25, 2010

Just a quick note for today. My lack of posting lately is the result of numerous interacting factors converging all at once. I apologize for not getting my weekly round-up of (what I think is) interesting writing in the geoscience blogosphere out this Monday. The entire staff here at Clastic Detritus came down with a nasty head cold and could only maintain enough mental focus to watch movies. The global-disaster-by-catastrophic-plate-tectonics film ’2012′ was quite enjoyable while in this intellectually challenged state.

I’ve got a few posts in the hopper that will be done in the coming days. In the meantime, check out this video posted on Dave’s Landslide Blog this morning of a debris flow in Pakistan (and wait until about 1 min 15 sec into the video for the interesting part). Wow.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.