Re: ILL's, licensing, and the French Revolution

[Jan Velterop <velteropvonleyden@btinternet.com>]

In the mindset of a traditional publisher there is this principle: get
paid for availability and usage of the material you publish, and if you
really must make a concession, make sure it's enough bother for the
librarian/author/reader that any non-paid availability or usage is kept to
a minimum. (The positive exposure argument of ILL is, in my view, just a
face-saving interpretation with hindsight, not one that led the publishers
to allow ILL. If it were a real argument, they would have stimulated ILL
rather than just allowed it.) Clearly, allowing ILL for electronic
material without the stipulation to print and fax or some other device to
introduce enough bother, just wouldn't do.

This is the mindset of a 'copyrightmonger', a merchant engaged in the
trade of copyrights (or similar access/usage rights).

This is a perfectly fine model, when it concerns publications that are
intended to generate income for the author. The publisher helps the author
and it's only right that he gets a cut of the revenues.

Publishing research results is different. The author does not publish for
financial gain. Instead, he must publish, or he will perish as research
scientist.

BioMed Central, the open access publisher of research articles, therefore
takes a different view. It sees itself as a service provider.  The service
is to manage and organise the peer review and publication process, and the
company gets paid for providing that service. The company does not need to
hold on to any rights to sell and generate its income. Copyrights,
originally devised to provide an incentive to authors to keep creating and
disseminating 'useful ideas', can now be left with the author again and
take up its role of spreading knowledge once more, rather than being
appropriated by the trade to introduce artificial scarcity of information
(which never was in the interest of science) and with that the possibility
of charging for it.

Copyright has nothing to do with quality. BioMed Central uses the same
peer review procedures as the best journals around and does not need to
have copyright to ensure quality. Springer's assertions in that regard are
nonsensical. Quality is assessed by a process of peer review and the
author's integrity is protected by copyright itself, not by transferring
it to the publisher. In fact, the right of integrity is not even part of
copyright in the anglosaxon interpretation of the Berne Convention (though
it is in the so-called roman interpretation, as used throughout
continental Europe), so transferring copyright comes with more risk for
the author rather than less.

Springer's offer of Open Choice is a PR stunt. The price is very high;  
they insist on keeping copyright; posting on a third party server is not
permitted (so really, it ain't open access at all) and it's designed to
fail, so that they can say that they've experimentally proven that 'open
access' is not viable. It's nothing if not cynical.  The only good news is
that they felt that they should be seen to offer 'something'. An
indication, perhaps, that open access is making traditional publishers
think about the viability and sustainability of their subscription model.

Jan Velterop

On 30 Jan 2005, at 19:41, brs4@lehigh.edu wrote:

[SNIP]

> 2. Unrelated to all this, can someone explain the logic of Springer's
> author pays OA model as explained at:
> http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,1-40359-12
> -115393- 0,00.html
>
> Specifically, in the following statement, how does it follow that a
> "high standard of quality" follows from transfer of copyright?
>
> "To protect the rights of authors and to guarantee a high standard of
> quality, Springer will continue to require standard consent-to-publish
> and transfer-of- copyright agreements. Copying, reproducing,
> distributing, or posting of the publisher's version of the article on a
> third party server is not permitted.  This enables Springer to provide
> the benefit of free online access while preserving scientific integrity
> and author attribution."
>
> Springer's policy contrasts markedly with BioMed Central's, at:
> http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/
>
> "No copyright transfer needed
>
> You keep the copyright on your research articles. This means you can
> post your research on your personal home page, print as many copies as
> you like and e- mail your paper around to colleagues, provided that
> correct citation details are included on the article and that BioMed
> Central is duly identified as the original publisher. Alternatively, for
> a small charge, you can order high quality reprints of your article."
>
> So according to Springer's logic, BioMed Central is going to compromise
> quality in some way. How does this follow?
>
> Brian Simboli