Is Rubicon Foundation's Archive defunct?

[lowwall]

Any member that has a document in electronic format they feel is useful to divers can attach it to a new thread and we can move it to the ScubaBoard Download Library.

Free distribution of documents must be allowed. As a general guideline, if the document is or has been for sale, distribution is restricted by copyright.

Of course Scubaboard can make any rules it wants for the hosting of external materials. But this is an inaccurate description of copyright and that is not the appropriate test anyway.

I'll put a couple of links in below for anyone interested in the details, but in general everything published since 1989 definitely has copyright protections and you should assume that everything published since 1927 has copyright protections. You might be able to show that those protections have lapsed for works published between 1927 and 1989, but that's not a trivial task. The big exception is for most US government publications. These are in the public domain by default.

However, just because something is covered by a copyright does not mean you can't republish part or all of it. The two most important exceptions are where the copyright holder grants permission to reuse the work and for fair use.

Fair use is a legal doctrine that allows the use of copyrighted materials without the copyright owners' permission. There is no perfect test of whether a reuse would fall under fair use, but there are several factors that are considered including those that would favor the finding of Fair Use in our context, such as: use for educational purposes, use of factual or technical materials (as opposed to creative works such as stories or novels), use that does not reduce sales of the original work such as out-of-print works.

LibGuides: Copyright Services: Copyright Term and the Public Domain

A guide to establishing the public domain status of items subject to copyright

guides.library.cornell.edu

U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index

The goal of the Index is to make the principles and application of fair use more accessible and understandable to the public by presenting a searchable database of court opinions, including by category and type of use (e.g., music, internet/digitization, parody).

www.copyright.gov

[link fixed]

 

[dmaziuk]

Additionally, Rubicon Foundation may have secured permissions from copyright holders, explicitly or implicitly, that they may be able to transfer to ScubaBoard, but that has to be worked out between all involved.

 

[Akimbo]

Of course Scubaboard can make any rules it wants for the hosting of external materials. But this is an inaccurate description of copyright and that is not the appropriate test anyway.

That's not exactly what I wrote, but could have been clearer.

Free distribution of documents must be allowed. As a general guideline, if the document is or has been for sale, distribution is restricted by copyright.

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The two most important exceptions are where the copyright holder grants permission to reuse the work and for fair use.

Exactly. Many scientific and educational works can be freely distributed because the owners have granted permission in writing. Most (all?) unclassified documents produced by the US Government are not copyrighted and are free to distribute, such as US Navy Diving Manuals.

The distinction is complex but matters. Another complication is copyright laws are not the same worldwide. I can see a lot of members wanting to scan and share their dive agency manuals or entire vintage dive magazines.

There are also rare works with long expired copyright protection that were manually transcribed and republished at great expense. My general feeling is it would be unethical to scan and post them without permission.

 

[John C. Ratliff]

If we’ve actually lost the Rubicon Foundation’s Archieve, it is truly a huge loss to the diving community. I’ve used it to look up studies made in the 1950s through 1980s of dive regulators and fins. I may have downloaded a few of these studies, and if I can find them, I will upload them to Scubaboard Download Library.

Anything produced by the NEDU is exempt from copyright problems, and is public domain unless it was classified (Secret or Top Secret).

ScubaBoard Download Library

Free library of diving related files curated by ScubaBoard staff. Please read the Special Rules before posting.

scubaboard.com

 

[VikingDives]

The site is down, but someone renewed the domain 6 months ago, so there's still hope.

@tbone1004, any updates?

 

[The Chairman]

There are discussions about reviving it.

 

[VikingDives]

While there isn't great diving coverage, some of the articles that people may be looking for can be found at Sci-Hub: knowledge as a human right, which has indexed some 88 million scientific articles into their database.

Additionally, the South Pacific Underwater Medical Society (SPUMS) has released all of their journal articles and other documents from 2021, back to the 70's, free to the public.

 

[bvanant]

Sure SciHub has lots of articles but many of them are stolen from the original publishers. They have been sued twice in the US for copyright violation and lost both but since they are or were in Kazakhstan it hasn't stopped them. As of a few months ago new uploads were halted because of some legal issue with Elsevier. So depending on your beliefs you might think twice about downloading something stolen. When we publish papers we have the choice to let them be open access or keep them behind the paywall. Page charges for our journals are like $1200/page but we mostly allow open access. I think that most research that is NIH funded has to be published in some form of open access. Sadly the high impact journals (Nature, Science, Cell, NEJM etc.) are still pay to get articles.

Bill

 

[dmaziuk]

If UCLA pays even a portion of its "institutional access" fees to e.g. Elsevier out of their State budget, then you've already paid for access to Elsevier articles. Last time Americans were in this sort of setup, they started throwing tea in the ocean and shooting redcoats.

 

[bvanant]

Sure SciHub has lots of articles but many of them are stolen from the original publishers. They have been sued twice in the US for copyright violation and lost both but since they are or were in Kazakhstan it hasn't stopped them. As of a few months ago new uploads were halted because of some legal issue with Elsevier. So depending on your beliefs you might think twice about downloading something stolen. When we publish papers we have the choice to let them be open access or keep them behind the paywall. Page charges for our journals are like $1200/page but we mostly allow open access. I think that most research that is NIH funded has to be published in some form of open access. Sadly the high impact journals (Nature, Science, Cell, NEJM etc.) are still pay to get articles.

Bill

If UCLA pays even a portion of its "institutional access" fees to e.g. Elsevier out of their State budget, then you've already paid for access to Elsevier articles. Last time Americans were in this sort of setup, they started throwing tea in the ocean and shooting redcoats.

Most UCLA publications are funded by the NIH/NSF/DARPA i.e. the federal government and they have ruled against SCIHUB at least twice. I am all for open access journals but by that same argument all kinds of things that the state pays for would be up for grabs. Unlike the Tea Party, there is no tax on most people (everyone drank tea) just people wanting data. I pay dues to the ACS as a member but don't get subscriptions for free. Paywalls for science are something that I think we have to live with. Saying that we SHOULD have access is not the same as stealing, let's change the law not simply decide that we are entitled to steal. One other thing that supposedly happens with SCIHUB is that they paid students who had access to give SCIHUB their credentials. Probably a violation of some academic rules.

Bill