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RE: NIH mandate - institutional repositories



Why not go one step farther? Current copyright law certainly allows universities to declare that any writing done by their faculty "within the scope of their employment" (which would include all writing of textbooks, journal articles, and monographs, which are all relevant to their career advancement) should be considered as "work made for hire," which would place legal ownership of copyright with the university as employer and put the university in a position to do anything it wished with academic work, including giving it all away for free. Talk about a mandate: this would be a super mandate! Universities themselves would be in a position, as large entities, to bargain with major commercial publishers and to insist that contracts are written in a way satisfactory to universities' needs. There would be no need for NIH legislation for the Federal Research Public Access Act.

Of course, I don't think for a second that faculty will allow their universities to exercise this right under copyright law, because the tradition of allowing faculty to claim copyright in their writings has been of such long standing. But it is a peculiarity of our current situation that universities loudly complain about copyright law's having lost its "balance" between rightsholders' and users' needs, with the result that such patchwork solutions as addenda to author contracts are now recommended, when in fact that very law as it exists now gives universities the power to solve all of their problems by one stroke of the pen, so to speak, taking advantage of the definition of "work made for hire" in Section 101 to stipulate all faculty work in their capacity as faculty as falling under that definition.

Who are their own worst enemies? Universities, as usual!

Sandy Thatcher
Director, Penn State Press

***

Aaron Edlin wrote:

My own thinking, and the philosophy of bepress, is that the
university is filled with many interests and constituencies.
The puzzle is getting them to work well together. Faculty seek to
promote themselves individually, and seek control and identity;
universities seek to promote themselves and grow; librarians seek
to create useful order from chaos. These goals can, but need not,
conflict.
[SNIP]