The mistake you make here is assuming that PUP's marketing efforts had nothing
to do with the book's gaining that wide audience. And no one is going to spend
that kind of money when there is no return on investment, and it is copyright
protection that incentivizes that investment. You might as
Hi all,
I know it’s a side-issue, but fwiw the 2005 edition of On Bullshit actually is
exactly the same text as the 1986 essay – just stretched out over 80 pages by
putting it in really large font (which is itself, ironically, a form of
bullshit imho):
Hi there,
Just to let you know.
In Autumn 2016, a law has been passed in France stating in its article 30, in
simple words, that the author of a research article retains the right to make
public his postscript.
Embargo periods, if any, cannot exceed 6 months for STM and 12 for HSS.
Article 30
Public domain is not consistent with the attribution requirements of
scholarship, regardless of length of the term. Two conundra:
1) If we use Plato's ideas we are obliged to cite them. This is important not
just for author moral rights, but to establish a chain of evidence. If I quote
Plato
But you still have to determine what is and what is not a journal article for
these purposes. Does it include an article in a semi-popular publication like
Scientific American or National Geographic? Even articles in places like the
New York Review of Books can be very scholarly, complete with
Saying that shortening the term of copyright for journal articles somehow
limits academic freedom seems like a strange argument (at best). It may
limit academic opportunity to make money in the rare cases you mention but
most legislation involves tradeoffs like this. The benefits of OA are
Who would benefit from public domain (or CC-BY) as default to scholarly works?
I argue: Elsevier would be the greatest beneficiary, and would do so through
using such works as part of toll access products such as Scopus and their
metadata services sold to rankings agencies (e.g. Times Higher
It's highly unlikely that Frankfurt or the other author I mentioned received
any federal funding that entailed making their work public domain. The
question arises--as it does for forcing authors to accept CC BY as the default
OA license--whether academic freedom should be limited in this way or
The "On Bullshit" example is quite an interesting one.
But I looked it up for the finer details of it - it is clearly not just a
simple "reprint".
Frankfurt’s essay "On Bullshit" was just 20 pages [Raritan Quarterly
Review 6 (1986) pp 81-100]
Frankfurt's book "On Bullshit" is 80 pages [Princeton
Sandy, I think the argument here is that the benefits of OA are
sufficiently great that isolated instances like this do not outweigh them.
Keep in mind too that if any article flows from federal funding it will
already be made public after 12 months, at least the accepted manuscript
will be,
Back in the days when publishers were putting out a lot of anthologies, there
was serious money to be made by authors of journal articles that got reprinted
many times. One author of ours at Penn State during that era earned well over
$10,000 from reprint rights to one of his articles. Do you want
We may actually be in agreement, Stevan
You say this ""100 years or so of copyright protection" is something
scholarly journal-article authors never needed or wanted. It was just
foisted on them as a 'value added" they could not refuse."
I say this in my IPA article: "The key point is that
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