On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 3:48 AM, Charles Oppenheim
<C.Oppenheim_at_lboro.ac.uk> wrote (in JISC-REPOSITORIES):
Arthur [Sale] is wrong on his final point. When an
author assigns copyright to a publisher, the author gives
away all rights. It is equivalent to selling your house,
your car or anything else. Once you've sold it, you've
no right to enjoy it's use any more, even though you were
the previous owner.
So when an author assigns copyright to a publisher, he or
she has no rights to keep a back up copy, store it in a
repository, etc., UNLESS the publisher graciously gives
permission for the author to do so. But what the
publisher cannot do is demand deletion, etc., of earlier
drafts of the manuscript, because the author has only
assigned the final accepted version to the publisher.
With all due respect, if this were true, then the author could not
keep and store a paper copy of the final draft of his book in his
attic either (or, for that matter, his author's copy of the published
book). And, as we all know, "earlier drafts" are a slippery slope.
The "penult," which is the refereed draft minus the copy-editing is
an earlier draft. So is an author's draft incorporating corrections.
No, the new medium has features that cannot be coherently, let alone
confidently described, let alone prescribed and proscribed, in this
papyrocentric way. The self-archiving computer scientist (since the
80's) and physicist (since the '90s) authors had it right: "Don't
ask, Don't Tell, Don't Fret, Just Do." Otherwise you will elicit a
welter of inconsistent, and in many cases incoherent opinion and
counter-opinion whilst you languish in a chronic state of Zeno's
Paralysis (as 85% of us foolishly persist in doing, for nigh on two
decades now).
And while I'm in the pulpit, let me also point out that the main
reason for deposit mandates is not to force research authors to do
something they don't really want to do (a few extra bureaucratic
keystrokes, as some of the stalwart defenders of "academic freedom"
seem to imagine), for they all want to maximise the usage and impact
of their research (as a half-century of keystrokes fulfilling
reprint-requests proves): It is to free these special authors from
the irrational inhibitions that keep them in their state of Zeno's
Paralysis.
Apologies for this interruption. Please return to your solemn
discussion of angels, heads and pins...
Stevan Harnad
Charles
On Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:01:59 +1100
Arthur Sale <ahjs_at_OZEMAIL.COM.AU> wrote:
Talat
Let me assure you that you should credit that a
court would accept a case
that repositories fulfil other functions. Indeed in
Australia we could argue
that they are required by the Federal Government
for the purpose of
institutional publication reporting and research
evaluation. Tasmanian law
requires the university to keep records for
long-term preservation under the
Archives Act and so do most States.
The other point you miss is that publishers have no
rights to prohibit a
restricted copy being mounted in a repository. If
an author chooses to keep
a copy of his or her article in one computer system
or another (or is
required to place a copy in a particular one) is of
no concern whatsoever to
a publisher. They might as well demand that the
author delete the manuscript
from their personal PC once it has been published!
Indeed my departmental
backup system makes regular copies from my PC
somewhere and I don't bother
enquiring where, nor does any publisher of my work.
Neither do they demand
that a particular filing cabinet be used for any
paper drafts. None of this
is of any concern to a publisher.
You and I have had this argument before and you
persist in this view, but it
cannot go unchallenged if you keep making it. It
does not stand up to
examination.
Arthur Sale
University of Tasmania
Received on Sat Feb 14 2009 - 11:32:23 GMT