[GOAL] Re: Librarians, copyright and the IR

[Andrew A. Adams]

Chris Zielinski <ziggytheblue at gmail.com>:

> 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                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
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/