On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Richard Poynder wrote: > > Ann Okerson wrote: > > Copyright: I've wondered how US legislation will be rewritten, as it > > would need to be. At this point, Section 105 of the US Copyright Act > > declares that the created work of government employees on government > > time is in the public domain. In this case, Section 105 language will > > need a significant adjustment: (1) either government funded work, even > > when not performed by government employees, will be "government work" by > > definition; or (2) private researchers, when working under government > > funding, become at that time government employees. (This is a variant > > of the Martin Sabo bill of last year, showing up in a different way.) > > The legislation would need to be clear both when the articles come into > > the public domain and that authors' moral rights are being retained even > > as the other basic rights of copyright would not be. (I think this kind > > of legislation could be a real issue for institutions benefitting from > > government funding -- universities, for example.) > > I wonder if a change in copyright legislation would indeed be necessary. > Is not the recommendation simply that the published output of all > NIH-funded research be archived in PMC? If so, does this inevitably mean > that the research has to be formally placed into the public domain, or > that the authors (or their institutions, or the publisher, or whoever the > copyright is vested in) will have to give up copyright? Perhaps a more > flexible approach would be to utilise some form of Creative Commons > licence?
I agree with Richard Poynder. OA is not about about changing copyright legislation; it is about providing immediate, permanent, toll-free full-text online access webwide (aka, Open Access, OA). And the House/NIH recommendation is not about changing copyright legislation but about mandating that the fundee must provide OA for all NIH-funded research, by self-archiving all resulting journal-article full-texts toll-free online. http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/NIH.html The one small thing that needs to be amended in the eventual US Bill is that it should not stipulate that the self-archiving *must* be in PMC. All that is necessary is to mandate that every article must be self-archived in an OAI-compliant OA archive. All OAI-compliant OA archives are interoperable. http://www.openarchives.org/ Hence it does not matter which OA archive contains the article; it is as if they all did. Moreover, the interoperability means that their metadata (author, title, journal, date) are all harvestable, so PMC too can harvest the metadata of all NIH-funded in OAI-compliant OA archives automatically (or can even stipulate that the researcher must deposit the article's *metadata* in PMC directly). http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse But the full-texts themselves need not be self-archived in PMC, and it is in fact preferable that they should be self-archived in the author's own institutional OA archives, as stipulated by the UK's recommended legistlation. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm This small but important amendment will then allow the US self-archiving mandate to propagate naturally beyond the NIH mandate's remit (NIH-funded biomedical research) to all research output, in all of each institution's disciplines. http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php The amendment will also prevent it from running needlessly counter to publishers' concerns about authorizing 3rd-party self-archiving (hence potentially authorizing free-riding 3rd-party rival-publishers). Ninety-two percent of the nearly 9000 journals sampled to date (including all of the core journals) have given their green light to author self-archiving, but a number of publishers specify institutional rather than central self-archiving. http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php Stevan Harnad See: "Public Access to Science Act (Sabo Bill, H.R. 2613)" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2977.html "Central versus institutional self-archiving" (Aug 8) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3905.html "AAU misinterprets House Appropriations Committee Recommendation" (Aug 3) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3892.html "Re: Mandating OA around the corner?" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3851.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm
