Re: Draft Policy for Self-Archiving University Research Output

From: Mark Doyle <doyle_at_APS.ORG>
Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2003 13:56:09 -0500

Greetings,

On Wednesday, January 8, 2003, at 11:19 AM, Tim Brody wrote:

> In my opinion I would rather the IPR were held by the institution -
> who paid
> for the research, facilities & support

By institution I think you mean "university" here, but I think it is
far more
common for universities to take funds from research grants to pay for
facilities and support. On the other hand, if you mean the institution
literally funding the author's grant (say, the NSF in US), then that is
a whole different ball of wax. It isn't clear that a government agency
is the best holder of the IP rights.

> - rather than with the publisher. If
> not for any other reason than an institution will rarely hold the same
> kind
> of monopoly as the big publishers.

The APS takes copyright for a variety of reasons (it has been a good
thing
lately for both scanning backfiles and for handling recent cases of
scientific fraud and plagiarism). The APS approach is to grant back
to authors all of the rights they expect (such as putting material
in centralized or institutional e-print archives, just not the APS
formatted
version). The question is whether there could be a mechanism for the
publisher
to also give these rights to the author's institution and even whether
there
could be an arrangement that allows institutional archives to use
the publisher formatted version for their own archives (and how to
ensure
the record stays complete and up-to-date regarding for example, errata,
retractions, corrections to online material, etc.). This last part is
one problem
with authors "self-archiving" - they may not be inclined to
make sure that errata (or worse) get recorded properly.

Another point worth making is that author's often have stronger
associations
over their career with the publishers of the journals they submit to
than with
their institutions. Authors might not be happy relinquishing rights to
their
work if they change employers.

Cheers,
Mark

Mark Doyle
Manager, Product Development
The American Physical Society
doyle_at_aps.org
Received on Wed Jan 08 2003 - 18:56:09 GMT