<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:41 PM, Stevan Harnad <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk" target="_blank">harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div style="word-wrap:break-word"><br><div><div>On</div></div><div>(And advise institutional researchers to ignore incoherent clauses</div><div>in their copyright agreements: Anything of the form "P but not-P" -- e.g.</div>
<div>"you retain the right to self-archive, but not if you are required to</div><div>exercise the right to self-archive" -- implies anything at all, as well as the</div><div>opposite of anything at all. </div></div>
</blockquote><div><br>Again complete agreement with Stevan.<br><br>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.<br>
<br>There are only two hypotheses:<br>* publishers are incompetent. That is true in many areas<br>* publishers are deliberately trying to obfuscate. That is also true.<br><br>Neither suggests we should be paying publisher billions for their "service"<br>
<br>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. <br>
<br>So without effective challenge the contracts become fuzzy to the benefit of the publishers. <br><br></div><br></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Peter Murray-Rust<br>Reader in Molecular Informatics<br>Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry<br>
University of Cambridge<br>CB2 1EW, UK<br>+44-1223-763069<br>