RE: NIH Public Access Mandate Passes Senate

["Rick Anderson" <rick.anderson@utah.edu>]

> 1.  Do you believe an author should have the right to ownership 
> of his or her own work?  That right would include the ability 
> to charge for access if anyone is interested in participating 
> in a market.  Or should an author (at least of scholarly 
> materials) have no presumption that he or she owns his written 
> work?

This isn't a binary issue -- that authors either do or don't have 
the right to do what they wish with their work.  I think it's 
reasonable to argue that, yes, authors generally do have the 
right to ownership of their work, but that they can still be 
required to do certain specific things with that work when the 
work was funded by the public purse.  If the public has funded 
the work, then it's reasonable for the public to be given some 
level of access to it.

After that, it becomes a question of degree.  Should everyone in 
the world get unlimited free access from the moment of the work's 
creation, or should there be some kind of embargo that leaves the 
author the option of giving exclusive rights to a publisher on a 
temporary basis? This is what the proposed policy would allow, 
and it seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library
University of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu