RE: restrictive license clause

["Peter Banks" <pbanks@diabetes.org>]

No repository or content provider can continue to include material it
knows to be defamatory or otherwise unlawful.

It is one thing to preserve the record of a scholarly controversy--say,
the record of a study that needs to be retracted or clarified. It is quite
another to continue to make available material that the content provider
knows or should know to be false and defamatory.

OA doesn't solve the problem; it compounds it, serving up multiple targets
for lawsuits.

Peter Banks
Publisher
American Diabetes Association
Email: pbanks@diabetes.org

>>> David.Goodman@liu.edu 6/15/2005 7:48:15 PM >>>

I consider this a serious problem, and one discussed frequently, but with
no easy solution

No one can really expect a commercial publisher to continue distributing
material whose copyright it does not own, or that a court has ordered
removed.. (True, they have been rather quick to remove any material that
might _possibly_ give rise to such problems. Thus the final clause of the
provision " or otherwise objectionable" is unjustified. )  Nor can we
expect a publisher to provide material to only some libraries on the basis
of variations in this clause. Thus, I'd first protest to them as you are
doing, and then finally sign such a clause as I have many times.

However, it is essential to the integrity of the scholarly record that no
material that has been published ever be actually removed. If an libelous
article is removed, how can the law case removing it be understood? How
can the development of law in cases of libel be written? If a fraudulent
article is removed, how will the citations of it be comprehensible? How
will we know which of the articles that cite it can still be trusted?

With print journal articles at least this was effectually guaranteed by
the physical impossibility of removing the articles worldwide.  If
electronic journals are to become the archival medium, the only effective
guarantee would be one where the publisher no longer controls the
distribution.

The simplest way of doing this is to contract for physical possession of
the medium. During my career I have seen the balance change several times
between local storage, and centralized storage with remote access. Now
that the capacity of media is increasing so rapidly, it may be time to
reconsider local storage.  It should even be possible for such a facility
to be incorporated within the next generation of library systems.

The even better way to deal with this-- and an obvious extension-- is Open
Access, which provides the capability for the preservation of the archive
in multiple repositories in multiple countries. This inherently prevents
central manipulation of the record, beginning the moment it is published.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu