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" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]>
