Bethesda and copyright (RE: OA and copyright -- Andy Gass quote in LJ News Wire)

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> She doesn't. The copyright holder is the only one who can exercise her 
> right to make her work truly open access (i.e. enlist the help of 
> anybody willing to copy and distribute the article further). She does 
> this because it is in her interest to do so. This is *using* her 
> exclusive right; not 'abdicating' it.

No.  If the author grants her exclusive rights to the world at large then
she has, by definition, given away her exclusive rights.  You can call
that "using" rather than "abdicating" if you want (or call it "enlisting
the help of others"), but that's little more than wordplay -- the fact is
that if I start out with an exclusive right to distribute a piece of my
writing, and I then grant "all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide,
perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute,
transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute
derivative works," then I have "used" my exclusive rights only in the
sense that I was the one who had the right to give them away.  They were
mine exclusively, and now they are the world's.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with doing that -- obviously,
authors should feel free to make their work as freely available as they
wish.  But let's not play word games.  An author who publishes according
to the Bethesda Principles does not retain any meaningful copyright over
her work.

----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 784-6500 x273
rickand@unr.edu