on Thu, 10 Aug 2000 Stevan Harnad <[email protected]> wrote:
>>From LJ Digital >> >>Authors Victorious in UnCover Copyright Suit (July 31, 2000) >> >>A group of authors have won their two-year-old copyright suit against the >>UnCover document delivery operation. A California court ruled on July 26 >>that UnCover must secure copyright permission from and pay royalties >>directly to an author before using that person's work to fill requests from >>customers, instead of relying on the original publisher to compensate the >>authors. UnCover said it will set up licensing agreements with authors for >>semi-annual payments. A web site -- http://www.uncoversettlement.com -- is >>being launched July 31, so authors can search to see if their work was >>illegally resold and to provide abused authors with information in >>collecting their share of the $7.25 million settlement. > >Insofar as books are concerned, nolo contendere. > >But insofar as refereed journal articles are concerned, this lawsuit >and its "victorious" outcome for researchers represents nothing but >short-sighted nonsense. > >Journal articles are author GIVE-AWAYS; Harnad confuses the exchange of copyright for valuable recognition and dissemination with the fact that money does not change hands. Authors work hard for acceptance and each has a selection hierarchy for submissions if the first choice will not publish. R. K. Merton has made this point at length. I believe any economist would agree that an exchange, not a give-away, takes place. > the average refereed journal >article (this is a free estimate, but unlikely to be far from the >truth) has, let's say, 25 readers, and zero citations (apart from >self-citations), in its entire life-cycle. (Authors for whom UnCover >raises that number by 1 or 2 are not "abused"!) Not relevant to "hot papers" that score hundreds or thousands of readings and citations -- the latter a regular feature in THE SCIENTIST. Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 <[email protected]>
