On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Steve Hitchcock wrote: > ... in many cases for authors to reserve a self-archiving right, rather > than copyright, is sufficient, but not in every case... One example is > where you might want to [1] reuse data in more than one paper. [T]here are > cases where research results [2] could be usefully be presented to different > audiences, where these audiences are understood and the work is carefully > targetted.
(1) Data *can* be re-used, all one likes. (It is up to the referees to decide whether there is any point merely re-presenting the data, but if there is, there is certainly no *copyright* basis for not re-presenting one's own data -- perhaps suitably reformatted! -- in further publications!) (In addition, open-access raw-data archiving will soon make it possible to *link* to the raw data, already openly accessible, rather than just including tiny subsets of it within the text-length limits of an article!) (2) As to re-publishing the *text* itself, rather than just the data: This surely is -- and should be -- primarily a journal-policy matter: One of the main reasons journals do not wish to re-publish an already-published paper is that it wastes precious (and freely-given) referee time to referee, again, a paper that has already been refereed (and published!) elsewhere. Another reason is of course to protect sales income (in both directions: the first publisher does not want the second publisher cutting his sales, and vice versa). Open access of course goes a long way toward remedying both of these problems: (1) Data can be self-archived and simply *data-mined* repeatedly for different publications. (Some form of data-refereeing will no doubt also co-evolve with the practise of data-archiving.) (2) And open access to the full-text mitigates or even moots some of the motivation for duplicate publication. But apart from that, I would reply to Steve as I did to Pam: Don't needlessly handicap a huge, important and reachable goal -- open full-text access through self-archiving -- by holding out for, or insisting upon, more than is really necessary (i.e., holding out for full copyright retention, rather than settling for merely the self-archiving right). Open access is far too important to delay it for that. If teaching/learning uses are not a justification for muddying the waters, the author's yen for multiple publication of the same paper certainly isn't either -- especially in the open-access age! (The specific problem Steve refers to -- in trying to place our co-authored paper in more than one journal in order to reach more than one audience -- is more a publicising problem than a publication problem [our paper being both a scientometric research paper *and* an open-access advocacy paper], and it is a symptom of this transitional stage, where publication plus open-access is not yet quite enough, because open-access has not yet prevailed, so not everyone is looking at the open-access version as the locus classicus. Patience! It will come; impatience now -- about multiple publication, and hence full copyright retention -- will only delay its coming.) Stevan Harnad
