Chris Zielinski <[email protected]>: > From my perspective as a former head of the UK collecting society > for British authors. the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society, I > think the real weak link in the copyright chain is the academic > author. If authors claimed or retained their copyright more strongly > and just gave publishers publication licenses for specific uses, > they could control, or at least influence, the openness of > publication.
Individual authors can't do this. It requires mass action, which we've shown in over a decade of discussion of OA that is very hard to acheive except by mobilising the existing institutional arrangements. Individual authors seeking a permission to publish rather than a copyright transfer are simply told that their papers cannot be published. At least that was my experience a few years ago when I tried a number of times tokeep the copyright to my papersand missed out on special issues relevant to my work, because the editor couldn't get permission from the corporate owner to vary their requirement to transfer cpoyright. Of course the US government has shown us that if a large enough (or inthe case of universities a large enough bloc) has apolicy, then the publishers will accept it. But individual authors just cut off their noses if they try this and as Stevan has pointed out, requiring a copyright retention clause can make it harder to get an OA policy accepted as authors quite rightly worry that their papers will be unable to be published in their journal of choice because of the copyright requirement. In an ideal world all publishers would have something similar to the ACM permission to publish license instead of a copyright transfer, butwe don'tlive in an ideal world and individual authors as individuals can't do anything to change this. Senior tenured professors may be able to ignore publication locus, but even they may be subject to reviews (e.g. REF) where nothaving published in the most prestigious places can harm them. -- Professor Andrew A Adams [email protected] Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
