On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, [identity removed] wrote: > Stevan Harnad wrote: > sh> There is a silly sentence at the end of [3] about "redistribution" > sh> which is about as meaningful and as enforceable as the distinction > sh> between (publicly!) self-archiving on a "personal" server vs. a > sh> "public" server. But the clause can do no harm, and if it makes > sh> ACM's Gutenberg-era copyright lawyers happy, it's quite welcome! > > As it stands, that clause near the end of [3] seems to me to forbid someone > from printing the article from the author's web site and then making > multiple copies as part of a course pack for, say, non-networked distance > learners. But an earlier part of [3] specifies that the copies must be > "limited to noncommercial distributions and personal use by others". So is > noncommercial distribution (eg as print copy for educational purposes) > allowed or not? If someone making a coursepack has to "clear" permission to > include each paper, this costs a vast amount - not just the fees but the > staff time, delay and hassle in the transaction. > > What do you think?
I think the ACM permission covers online copies only. Individual users can print off their own copies of whatever they find online, of course, but please let us not mix agendas: on-paper and on-line "fair use" issues such as 2nd-party course packs for teaching will eventually benefit from the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), but their needs cannot (and should not) be put forward as part of the rationale or justification for Open Access itself: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml They are not part of the justification for Open Access, and should not be; and if they are mixed into the BOAI in some way, they can and will only retard progress (both for open access and for fair use). The SOLE rationale and justification for the BOAI is that the particular documents in question -- author give-away research -- are written and given away by their authors for one sole reason: to maximize their impact on research (i.e., how much they are USED, by being read, cited, and built-upon by other researchers). The reason Open Access was not feasible in the on-paper era was that the real Gutenberg costs of on-paper production and dissemination were just too big, and had to be paid through access-tolls (purchase, subscription) if the research was to be circulated at all. The on-line era has now made it possible for the research to be produced and disseminated online-only -- in principle, though this is mostly not yet done in practice: In practice, journal publishers still produce an on-paper edition, in parallel with their on-line edition, and they must hence cover the real costs of both. And there is still a thriving market for the on-paper edition; and it is those revenues that are also still paying, among other things, for the peer-review (an essential service). So by self-archiving their own research -- both their pre-peer-review preprints and their post-peer-review postprints -- publicly ON-LINE, researchers can open access to their own work, ON-LINE. For research access, this is sufficient, as everyone has online access, and printing off for individual use is permitted. But paper course packs are an entirely different matter! They are not on-line individual copies but on-paper multiple copies. They compete directly with the paper edition of the journal. And they have nothing to do with the researchers' rationale for self-archiving. (That does not mean that researchers do not approve of or even applaud them: but they are a side-issue for research and researchers.) Nor would researchers' face-valid crusade to maximize their research impact by maximizing research access to their research output have had any validity at all if it were simply a crusade for fair use in 2nd-party course-packs for teaching purposes. Most refereed research never finds its way into teaching course-packs anyway. (Most of it is hardly even read or used by other researchers, and that is the problem open-access is meant to remedy!) But the clearest reason for the dissociation between the movement for open access for research and researchers and the movement for fair use for teaching course-packs is that the peer-reviewed research literature (for most of which there is in any case little demand for teaching purposes) is exclusively an author-giveaway literature, whereas the target literature for course-pack use in teaching is far, far bigger, including decidedly non-give-away literature such as (excerpts from) textbooks, monographs, and non-give-away periodical contents. There is no overall rationale for open access to this vast non-give-away literature. Nor would open-access itself have been feasible apart from the online medium. The open access movement is focussed exclusively on freeing on-line access, not on-paper access. If on-paper access were part of the agenda (and, even worse, if non-give-away literature were targeted too) the movement would simply collapse. So please be patient. There will be some trickle-down from the open access to benefits for teaching use, but teaching use cannot be cited as one of the reasons for open access now, and if it were, it would have the opposite effect. My suggestion is that you make your course-packs online, and let nature take care of the rest. Where students do not have on-line access, I am afraid the BOAI cannot help. And we are not trying to prevent cost-recovery for on-paper editions by generating competing paper editions (even in the form of 2nd-party course-packs). Stevan Harnad
