[Posted for Steve Koonin with permission] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- List-Post: [email protected] List-Post: [email protected] Date: Sat, 19 Sep 1998 07:08:00 -0700 To: Stevan Harnad <[email protected]>, Ira Fuchs <[email protected]> From: Steve Koonin <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Important question for Steve Koonin and Ira Fuchs Cc: Joseph Ransdell <[email protected]>
Stevan: My answer to your question is a resounding "Of course!." The strawman proposal that kicked off the Caltech debate was to simply modify the current submission/review/acceptance/publication process by substituting for the publisher's copyright form an Institute copyright assignment document that granted the publisher limited rights and retained _jointly_ for the author and the Institute rights to post, use for education/research, disseminate not-for-profit, etc. The driving issue for me (as I believe it has been for you and many others I've talked with) has not been _university control_ of the scholarly record, but rather the prevention of _publisher control_ of the scholarly record and the preservation of that record as a common good, freely accessible. I would be happy to see copyright reside solely with the individual scholars, but then there is the associated nuisance of responding to requests for reproduction rights, etc. >> There never was (nor will there ever be, at least at Caltech) any suggestion of supression of publication. And none of the Caltech faculty have raised this concern (or at least, I haven't heard it). While the faculty and administration here certainly don't always see eye-to-eye on everything around here, I would expect that there's far too much mutual respect and commitment to academic freedom for that level of paranoia to arise. Steve --------------------------------------------------------------- Steven E. Koonin Vice President and Provost/Professor of Theoretical Physics California Institute of Technology e-mail: [email protected] Phone: (626) 395-6336 Web: http://www.caltech.edu/~koonin/ FAX: (626) 795-1898 Snail mail: Caltech 206-31, Pasadena, CA 91125 --------------------------------------------------------------- jr> [Harnad's] closing suggestion that the university's co-ownership be only jr> formalized in the publication agreement/licensing itself (i.e., at jr> point of publication), and that the author's right to archive publicly jr> in perpetuo be a permanent component of all such agreements/licenses jr> sounds fine except that it is not clear why a university would want to jr> cooperate in copyright which had such a proviso in it, effectively jr> nullifying their control, and it seems very unlikely to me that many jr> administrations would in fact agree to such a simple relinquishment of jr> the power normally associated with copyright. sh> Let this question be put explicitly to the proponents of sh> scholar/university co-ownership of copyright (for refereed journal sh> articles), beginning with Professor Koonin of Cal Tech and Professor sh> Ira Fuchs of Princeton, who likewise attended the 1997 Conference on sh> Scholarly Communication at Cal Tech organised by Koonin and sh> attended by the Provosts from the major US Universities: sh> Would you cooperate in copyright which had such a proviso in it? --------------------------------------------------------------------- List-Post: [email protected] List-Post: [email protected] Date: Sat, 19 Sep 1998 13:06:21 +0100 (BST) From: Stevan Harnad <[email protected]> To: Steve Koonin <[email protected]>, Ira Fuchs <[email protected]> cc: Joseph Ransdell <[email protected]> sh> Dear Steve and Ira: sh> You could be a great help in clarifying an important question sh> raised in the current debate in the Chronicle of Higher Education sh> and the American Scientist about both Steve's proposal and the sh> Science September 4 proposal (Bachrach et al., including Marty Blume) sh> about copyright. sh> The question is: would the Koonin proposal be met by an agreement that sh> formalized author/university co-ownership of a (refereed journal) paper sh> only at the point of making the limited copyright transfer agreement with sh> the publisher, i.e., at point of publication, and in every case sh> explicitly guaranteeing the author's right to publicly archive the sh> paper for free (e.g., in the Los Alamos Physics Archive, xxx.lanl.gov, sh> and the author's institutional server)? sh> The reason for specifying that the argeement is made at point of sh> publication, and for the guarantee of the author's public archiving sh> rights, is to answer worries such as those of Professor Randsell who sh> infers (I think wrongly) that the objective of the copyright proposal sh> might be to suppress publication in some cases, rather than to promote sh> it. sh> Best wishes, sh> Stevan Harnad -----------------------------------------------------------------------
