As soon as someone suggests " you know it really is a crazy system under
which commercial publishers acquire, at no cost, all intellectual property
rights to the work of authors which is produced by the often-unpaid labour
of academics (because they love their subject area) and by the money of
taxpayers (academic salaries, fellowships, libraries, prior education, etc.)
and student tuition fees" you get accused of taking "clearly an anti-library
anti-science position."
Not at all clear to me, Albert, just as it was not clear to a lot of people
some centuries that the earth was flat just because people said it was.
Alan Story
Kent Law School
---- Original Message -----
From: "Albert Henderson" <chessNIC_at_COMPUSERVE.COM>
To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2001 1:47 PM
Subject: Re: PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research
on Fri, 22 Jun 2001 Alan Story <a.c.story_at_ukc.ac.uk> wrote:
> The ALPSP may call their deal a "model licence"...but instead it should be
> called a "Model-T (as in circa 1930 Model-T Ford ) licence."
>
> Yes, the author gets the possibility of retaining copyright, but the
> publisher is assigned (at no cost to the publisher it should be
underlined)
> ALL of the other rights, including digitalisation rights, re-publication
> rights, rights regarding non-profit educational uses of the work.
>
> Hence, AFTER hard copy publication ( and hence not conflicting with
Harnad's
> "subversive proposal"), the publisher has the right to prevent any "open
> archiving" by an author(X) or her/his work and the right to charge the
> students of X's colleague a copyright royalty fee for the non-profit
> educational use of that article.
>
> In other words, a tiny tad better than the standard contract available
with
> most commercial publishers...but still a Model T in the contemporary era.
>
> Any license should grant only one right to a publisher: a first hard-copy
> publication right. And not a tad more.
Clearly an anti-library anti-science position. It was the
outspoken interest in electronic formats by major science
research libraries, more than any other group, that encouraged
science publishers to invest in digital dissemination.
Albert Henderson
<70244.1532_at_compuserve.com>
Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT