Re: Vanishing articles (was: RE: restrictive license clause)

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

I just want to add that I entirely agree with Scott. When I worked for a
very large conglomerate (not Elsevier) I thought that I should warn the
corporate lawyers that there was a strong likelihood that some of the
necessary rights in some of the articles in journals we were putting
online might not have been transferred. Back in 1995 record keeping was
just not good enough to be sure.I paid a visit to the HQ. The message was
short - it was a question. Will you be sued? I was able to answer that it
was extremely unlikely. I was told to go ahead. Many corporate lawyers
work in this way. However if (as a publisher) you go to an outside lawyer
in circumstances like this one and the one described below, they probably
do not know much about the context and in any case they have to provide
(for) the worst case scenario. I should add that I am certain that my
views are not held by all publishers and their legal counsels.

Anthony

----- Original Message -----
From: "T Scott Plutchak" <tscott@uab.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2005 12:48 AM
Subject: RE: Vanishing articles (was: RE: restrictive license clause)

> I'll just add one comment, since Anthony has shared the document that he
> and I worked up.  While I would never suggest that a publisher keep an
> article online in defiance of a court order, there are very few cases in
> which such an order is actually issued.  In most of the cases that I've
> looked at, to the extent that I've been able to determine cause,
> articles have been removed because the publisher's lawyers are worried
> that they _might_ get sued.  This is a reasonable position for company
> lawyers to take -- it is, after all, their job to avoid getting sued.
> But an excess of caution will lead publishers to remove articles when
> the integrity of the scientific record would require that they be kept,
> particularly in the absence of clear-cut policies governing how
> retractions or removals should be handled.
>
> Scott
>
> T. Scott Plutchak
> Editor, Journal of the Medical Library Association
> Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
> University of Alabama at Birmingham
> tscott@uab.edu