[GOAL] Re: Sharing and reuse - not within a commercial economy, but within a sharing economy

[Andrew A. Adams]

While Jeffrey Beale may find it acceptable, moral and simple to assign his 
copyrights to a publisher simply for the benefit of being published, I find 
it an intolerable demand and while I do sign such in order to facilitate my 
career and to gain the benefits of dissemination in the best journal for my 
work I find the consequences appalling.

Here is a real example of the consequences.

For a paper I and two others wrote, I created a diagram showing our 
expression of a well-known but variously exressed concept (the uchi-soto 
model of Japanese social interaction). As part of their further work my two 
co-authors wrote another article which used the same concept and wished to 
re-use the diagram I'd created. I was quite happy that they do so since 
although I had created the diagram my understanding of the concept had been 
developed from their teaching - I was simply better able to use graphic 
design tools to render it simple to understand. Because we'd had to sign a 
copyright transfer in order to get the original article published somewhere 
suitable (we went through three journals before finally finding one for which 
the topic fit the aims and objectives) we had to go back to the publisher and 
get permission to use re-use the diagram. Even if it had been me, I would 
have had to go through the same process. No other publisher would accept the 
article reproducing the diagram without a copyright permission form from the 
publisher of the first article. I find this a ridiculous situation and 
contrary to the ideals of the development of scholarship.

Having learned from this, I now plan to release all graphics I create that I 
might use in an article, under a CC-BY license before submission. I'd like to 
release it under CC-BY-SA because I'm a believer in copyleft, but that would 
prevent me from using it in articles where the publisher requires me to asign 
copyright in the article, and where they won't release the article CC-BY-SA 
themselves.

(While it's possible that a publisher could then refuse to publish an article 
using that diagram, I think it's unlikely - I don't work in a field where the 
diagrams are a huge part of the value of the article - I understand that is 
not the case universally. They could require me to take down my original copy 
from my website as part of the agreement to publish, but I could just make 
sure that someone else was still making a copy available and I would have no 
ability to prevent that spreading. I have gone through a similar issue with a 
book publisher. I released a set of lecture slides under a CC license while 
writing a textbook on the topic. The publisher wanted slides and I offered 
these, but pointed out that they were already available, and had been for 
about a year, under a CC license, so while I could transfer copyright in the 
slides to them - that's what they demanded - it would be pointless since even 
I myself could still use them under the original CC release. After some 
internal discussion they released them on their website under the same CC 
license I'd used - CC-BY-NC, which I later realised is the wrong license and 
I now use CC-BY-SA where I can and CC-By where I can't require SA.)


-- 
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/