[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services

Yes, and so do our contracts, but they have various provisions such as allowing authors to reuse the article in any further work of their own and sharing income from subsidiary rights sales 50/50. Some journal article authors have made thousands of dollars from reprints of their articles and our rates for reprints and coursepack use are not even all that high. Concerning the reason for copyright transfer, as a publisher, we need exclusive rights to conduct our business because non-exclusive rights do not give a publisher standing to sue for infringement. Our authors would generally not be motivated to sue to protect us against piracy; for them, greater distribution, even illegal distribution, is a bonus.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


Sandy,

I would be interested in knowing how your authors profit from
having their articles reprinted in coursepacks since most of the
copyright transfer agreements that I have seen from journals turn
over all copyright to the publisher.

David L. Osterbur, Ph.D.
Access and Public Services Librarian
Countway Medical Library
Harvard Medical School
Boston, MA 02115
E-Mail: david_osterbur@hms.harvard.edu

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2008 7:35 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services

As your Iowa example indicates, there has been a little pushback against the mandated deposit of dissertations in IRs or centralized databases like ProQuest's or the Networked Digital library of Theses and Dissertations. But I emphasize "little." In truth, junior faculty put themselves at a disadvantage by having their dissertations archived in such places because, as I have written elsewhere, many libraries refuse to purchase books based on dissertations, and in turn presses become reluctant to publish them because their sales tend to be lower. Exceptions are mostly made for dissertations in science where patent issues are involved.

I won't dispute your contention that journal authors are not motivated to publish for monetary gain. In fact, though, some of them profit very handsomely from having their articles frequently reprinted and used in coursepacks. Some of our journal authors have made far more money from these sales than our book authors have made from royalties.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

On Sun, 23 Mar 2008, Sandy Thatcher wrote:


Stevan Harnad: We must think beyond just the NIH mandate to
all university research output, funded and unfunded, in all
disciplines.

You don't really mean "all," do you, Stevan? Repeatedly in the
past you have excluded research that appears in book form.
This, of course, doesn't make sense from the standpoint of
achieving comprehensive coverage of all research output of
universities and imposes artificial barriers between research
appearing in different formats. There can ultimately be no
intellectual justification for this separation.

You are quite right, Sandy. I don't mean all research output, I

>mean all peer-reviewed journal/conference output (the c. 2.5
>million papers per year).
>
>(I keep ritually reiterating the same portmanteau phrases so
>often that I sometimes truncate them to give those who have

heard them too often a bit of a break!)

And you are also right that a distinction between a research
paper and a research monograph is not a principled distinction
insofar as content is concerned. It is just a practical
distinction, insofar as (current) author motivation is
concerned. But as a current, practical distinction, it is
pertinent, accurate, and needs to be taken into account:

*All* peer-reviewed research paper authors, without a single
exception, give away their articles, having written them
*exclusively* for research impact, not for royalty income
(actual or potential). Let us call them "give-away authors."

>http://cogprints.org/1639/01/resolution.htm#1.1

This is simply not true of all scholarly/scientific book and
monograph authors (often the same authors, but wearing different
hats): Not all (probably not even most) such book authors are
give-away authors.

Hence it follows that even if most do not do it spontaneously of
their own accord (for paradoxical reasons I've dubbed "Zeno's
Paralysis -- consisting mostly of overwork inertia, copyright
paranoia, and simple ignorance, lately diminishing), give-away
authors can be induced by a mandate from their institutions and
funders to go ahead and give away their give-away work by
self-archiving it free for all online (preferably in their
Institutional Repository), *willingly* (as Alma Swan's surveys
have shown). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10999/

But non-give-away authors cannot and should not be mandated to
give away their non-give-away work, so we should not even think
of trying it. That would only complicate the already needlessly
complicated road to Green OA self-archiving mandates for the
give-away work (already complicated by premature and unnecessary
over-reaching on copyright retention and by completely
unnecessary insistence on direct central deposit instead of
institutional deposit and central harvesting).
</ritual-repetition>
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/374-guid.html

Counter-productively insisting on the OA self-archiving of books
that authors do not currently wish to give away would be very
much like insisting on copyright retention by authors who are
paranoid about not putting their chances of publication in their
preferred journals at any perceived risk. And it would be just
as unnecessary -- since, for both of these desirable outcomes,
their time will come in due course (as it will for Gold OA
publishing too). But first things first. And it is Green OA
self-archiving mandates for give-away research that will pave
the way.

A symptom of the fact that OA book mandates would be a no-no comes
from the recent kerfuffle about Iowa Theses: Even though most theses
are probably author give-aways, and will be willingly self-archived,
those held in reserve for future book publication will not, so OA
should not be mandated for them.
http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2008/march/031708mfa.html

Here again, Green OA IRs offer a possible interim compromise: Like
articles published in journals that have not yet endorsed immediate
OA self-archiving, non-give-away theses can be deposited as Closed
Access instead of Open Access. The authors need simply refuse all
email eprint requests received via the Button. (They can even store
their refused eprint requests and use them as evidence of demand for
their work when they approach a publisher!)
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html

Stevan Harnad