[BOAI] The lawyer is in the details

[Bernard Lang]

Hi,

I back from a formal discussion about publishing contracts in general,
and what happens afterwards regarding digital versions of the work. It
becomes quickly quite technical (in the legal sense) and I found
myself unable to understand in a precise way what are the implications
of OA mandates, or OA contracts.

I do not just mean the access to works by individual scientists, but
what can be done with the works in a very general sense, and by whom.

There is a lot more at stakes than just casual access, and the devil
is in the details of the contracts, whether green, gold, or any other
color. I am especially afraid of infra-red.

Indeed the page http://www.soros.org/openaccess/help lists many issues
in its "How accessible?" section, issues that may be crossed by the
fact that access may be done via commercial devices.

So my question is whether there is in-depth analysis of open-access
contracts signed by authors, and their implications for the future,
given that many such contracts will last for 70 years after the
author's death, that is essentially for ever.

A related question is whether there is somewhere a repository of
contracts used by the 23000 academic publications (from memory, I read
that figure in a report), whether run privately, by academia or by
learned organizations.

Although books are not generally concerned by OA, it might be
interesting to know the general access constraints for their digital
form.  Is it really reasonnable to give exclusivity for more than 20
or 30 years (which seems to me already extremely long) ?  I am not
talking about the duration of copyright, but only about the
publisher's digital exclusivity on a given edition of the book.
I am fully aware that this is a somewhat different issue.

Cordialement

Bernard Lang


-- 
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