[GOAL] Re: Agreement on Green OA not needed from publishers but from institutions and funders

[David Prosser]

A tiny point.  I'm not entirely sure what Peter means when in:


> It is confounded by the fact that although libraries sign 10,000 (universities) * 100 (publisher) = 1 million contracts a year I have never heard of a single case of the contract being challenged. And in most cases the contracts are secret. After all librarians respect the role of publishers and if presented with a contract not only sign it but also police it for the publishers. 
> 
he comments on contracts being 'challenged'.  If he means in the negotiation process then certainly for the UK they are often challenged, changed and improved (from the customers' viewpoint).  Not always as much as one would like, but that's often the case in negotiations.  And actually for journals there are now very few confidential contracts.

David



On 20 Jun 2012, at 13:06, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:

> 
> 
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:41 PM, Stevan Harnad <harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> On
> (And advise institutional researchers to ignore incoherent clauses
> in their copyright agreements: Anything of the form "P but not-P" -- e.g.
> "you retain the right to self-archive, but not if you are required to
> exercise the right to self-archive" -- implies anything at all, as well as the
> opposite of anything at all.
> 
> Again complete agreement with Stevan.
> 
> I was talking yesterday to someone who'd set up businesses and now was dealing (I won't say who/why) with some library / publisher contracts. S/he told me that they were the worst written most amateur contradictory incoherent contracts they have ever seen.
>  
> There are only two hypotheses:
> * publishers are incompetent. That is true in many areas
> * publishers are deliberately trying to obfuscate. That is also true.
> 
> Neither suggests we should be paying publisher billions for their "service"
> 
> It is confounded by the fact that although libraries sign 10,000 (universities) * 100 (publisher) = 1 million contracts a year I have never heard of a single case of the contract being challenged. And in most cases the contracts are secret. After all librarians respect the role of publishers and if presented with a contract not only sign it but also police it for the publishers. 
> 
> So without effective challenge the contracts become fuzzy to the benefit of the publishers. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
> <ATT00001..txt>

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