RE: OA Mandates, Embargoes, and the "Fair Use" Button

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

Sandy Thatcher is confusing
     (1a) Open Access Self-Archiving
and
     (1b) Closed Access Self-archiving plus the Fair-Use Button.

Sandy is also confusing the issue of
     (2a) publishers who have or have not recently given their green light
     to Open Access Self-Archiving (1a)
and
     (2b) the longstanding fair-use practice by authors of mailing
     paper reprints to requesters and, more recently, emailing eprints
     to requesters.

Unlike the above current and straightforward matters, the 
question Sandy raises about what will turn out to be the 
irreducible essentials of Gold OA journal publishing after Green 
OA self-archiving reaches 100% -- (i) *if* the demand for the 
paper edition ever vanishes, and (ii) *if* subscriptions ever 
become unsustainable -- is a hypothetical one. Sandy asks whether 
I think those essentials will consist of peer review alone or 
peer review plus copy editing: My guess is no better than anyone 
else's but I'll guess it'll be mostly just peer review, with a 
little copy-editing added on too.

(I've done more than my share of substantive editing too, and I 
agree that most journal article authors are terrible writers. I 
guess that's why they didn't become writers. I too would like to 
see the level of journal article writing improved.)

Stevan Harnad

On Tue, 29 May 2007 sgt3@psu.edu wrote:

> If this is what the "Fair Use Button" is all about, then Rick 
> is right, and Stevan is profoundly misguided in thinking that 
> an author reserves any kind of "fair use" rights after signing 
> a contract that transfers all rights to the publisher, which is 
> the typical transfer agreement used in journal publishing. It 
> doesn't matter whether it is the peer-reviewed but not final 
> version or the final PDF, nothing can be transferred by the 
> author to anyone else unless it is specifically allowed by the 
> contract once the contract has been signed. In recent years, 
> many publishers have relaxed their proprietary control by 
> allowing authors to do many more things, such as posting 
> peer-reviewed but not final versions on their own web sites. 
> But the key word here is "allowed": the author has no "fair 
> use" right to do this absent a clause in the contract 
> permitting such activity.
>
> It's also interesting to me that Stevan considers 
> self-archiving to reduce all publications costs to just the 
> cost of peer review. I guess that means he has no respect for 
> the value of copyediting, which does indeed cost money.  It 
> would be a much devalued world if we had to rely on authors 
> alone to master the niceties of the English language. In my 
> experience of forty years in publishing (beginning as a 
> copy-editor), I have met few authors who do not benefit from 
> copyediting.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press