RE: Call for input on digital rights management

[Jan Velterop <jan@biomedcentral.com>]

David, you got a point there. We don't worry about anthologies. All the
primary research articles are available, for free, in open access, so if
somebody wants to pay for a printed anthology you are putting together, so
be it.

If a profit-making commercial enterprise wants to use an article for sales
promotion and reprints thousands of them, we suggest to them to make a
contribution to a fund that allows authors to publish in open access. So
far, companies have graciously done that. The amount we suggest is in the
same order of magnitude as what they would have to pay for reprint
permission elsewhere.

We leave it to he author(s) of the article to decide whether to use the
fund to pay for his or her own future papers in any of the open access
journals BioMed Central publishes, to share it with fellow-authors from
his or her institution who wish to publish in that way (putting it towards
an institutional BioMed Central membership, which entitles to automatic
waivers of Article Processing Charges), or to put it in a general fund,
which is used to support authors from developing countries.

Best,

Jan

-----Original Message-----
From: David Goodman
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Sent: 7/11/02 10:27 PM
Subject: RE: Call for input on digital rights management

Wait a minute, Jan. Do you mean that if I were to take selected excellent
articles from your publications, and reprint them as an anthology, and
sell them in hard copy for my own profit, you (and the authors) would
consider this fair? Agreed, this very very rarely happens. Practically the
only publisher who has in recent years done this on a more or less regular
basis is Scientific American, which of course is not a primary research
publication. But what if a profit-making commercial enterprise wanted to
reprint 50,000 copies of an article involving one of their products and
use it as a sales promotion?

David Goodman
Research Librarian and
Biological Sciences Bibliographer
Princeton University Library
dgoodman @princeton.edu            609-258-7785

On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, Jan Velterop wrote:

[SNIP]

> All use is fair use. At least for research published by BioMed Central.
>
> Jan Velterop
> Publisher BioMed Central