Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Fair Use and Fat Mice

Here's a question: What is unusual about this image of the complex interaction between genes and obesity in mice that I used in lecture today?

Give up? The answer is that I had permission to use it. The image was published in PLoS Genetics - a peer reviewed paper published by the Public Library of Science. Not only is the image free for me to use in class but I can link directly to the paper , which is also free for anyone to read.

"everything we publish is freely available online throughout the world, for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish."

Unfortunately this is still rather unusual - although hopefully it is a sign of things to come. It is an illustration of how well the policy works that I came across this article because Carl Zimmer, a science writer with an interesting genetics blog, the Loom, wrote about it. He also incuded a link to a recent article he wrote in Discover Magazine entitled Mendel's Mouse that is well worth a read and fits in perfectly with today's lecture.

I mention the issue of copyright because I get frequent requests that I make my Powerpoint slides available to you. I don't do this because I don't have copyright clearance for all the pictures, cartoons, diagrams etc I might use. Whilst it might be fair use to use them once in a lecture (even this is probably debatable) I doubt that would extend to distributing copies. You could argue that I should get permission for all the images I want to use - but this does not seem feasible. Not only would it take up an impractical amount of time but it would prevent me updating lectures. My next task tonight, for example, is to look through tomorrow's lecture and I may well add some new example, as I did yesterday. Getting permission to use images probably requires weeks if not months of time.

This is why I clearly give you the equivalent figure number in Campbell for
important figures and provide lecture outlines. Another option would be to just use figures I have permission to use, basically all the figures from Campbell, which would make for a fairly dull lecture. Then I could distribute the slides - but you wouldn't need them because they'd all be in Campbell!

This time last year:
Evolution in ten words, The 'theory' of evolution and Summer Reading.

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