[GOAL] 1st-Party Give-Aways vs. 3rd-Party Rip-Offs

[Stevan Harnad]

If supplying eprints to requesters could be delegated to 3rd parties like
Repository Managers<https://theconversation.com/neuroscientists-need-to-embrace-open-access-publishing-too-16736#comment_198916>
to
perform automatically, then they would become violations of copyright
contracts.

What makes the eprint-request
Button<https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy> legal
is the fact that it is the *author* who decides, in each individual
instance, whether or not to comply with an individual eprint request for
his own work; *it does not happen automatically*.

Think about it: If it were just the fact of requesters having to do two
keystrokes for access instead of just one (OA), then the compliance
keystroke might as well have been done by software rather than the
Repository Manager! And that would certainly not be compliance with a
publisher OA embargo. "Almost OA" would just become 2-stroke OA.

No. What makes the eprint-request
Button<https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy> both
legal and subversive is that it is not 3rd-party
piracy<http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0671.html>
(by
either a Repository Manager or an automatic computer programme) but 1st-party
provision of individual
copies<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/262893/1/resolution.html#9.1>,
to individual requesters, for research purposes, by the author, in each
individual instance: the latter alone continues the long accepted tradition
of reprint-provision by scholars and scientists to their own work.

If reprint-request cards had been mailed instead to 3rd-parties who simply
photocopied anyone's articles and mailed them to requesters (with or
without a fee) the practice would have been attacked in the courts by
publishers as piracy long ago.

*The best way to undermine the Button as a remedy against publisher OA
mandates, and to empower the publishing lobby to block it, would be to
conflate it with 2-stroke 3rd-party OA!*

That practice should never be recommended.

Rather, make crystal clear the fundamental difference between 1st-party
give-away and 3rd-party rip-off.


[Parenthetically: Of course it is true that all these legal and technical
distinctions are trivial nonsense! It is an ineluctable fact that the
online PostGutenberg medium has made technically and economically possible
and easily feasible what was technically and economically impossible in the
Gutenberg medium: *to make all refereed research articles* -- each, without
exception, an author give-away, written purely for research impact rather
than royalty income -- *immediately accessible to all would-be users*, not
just to subscribers: OA. That outcome is both optimal and inevitable for
research; researchers; their institutions; their funders; the R&D industry;
students; teachers; journalists; the developing world; access-denied
scholars and scientists; the general public; research uptake, productivity,
impact and progress; and the tax-payers who fund the research. *The only
parties with whose interests that optimal outcome is in conflict are the
refereed-research publishers* who had been providing an essential service
to research in the Gutenberg era. It is that publishing "tail" that is now
trying to wag the research "dog," to deter and delay what is optimal and
inevitable for research for as long as possible, by invoking Gutenberg-era
pseudo-legal pseudo-technicalities to try to embargo OA, by holding it
hostage to their accustomed revenue streams and *modus operandi*. OA
mandates, the immediate-deposit clause, and the eprint-request Button are
the research community's means of mooting these delay tactics and hastening
the natural evolution to the optimal and inevitable outcome in the
PostGutenberg era.]

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open
Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing"
Button<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/>.
In: *Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture
Online<http://www.utppublishing.com/Dynamic-Fair-Dealing-Creating-Canadian-Culture-Online.html>
* (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)
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