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Re: NIH Public Access Mandate Passes Senate

But, of course, most of that value added through peer review is NOT paid for by the publisher but is contributed gratis by the scholars who review journal articles. Imagine what it would cost, in terms of subscription prices or author fees, if that part of value added were actually monetized and the reviewers compensated for their time!

A small correction on copyright: U.S. law, unlike European law, recognizes no "moral" rights under copyright (with the tiny exception of Section 106A's provision for works of visual art). The closest equivalent comes in provisions of other laws, like the Lanham Act.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press

We are often required to share what we 'own'. We often neither
can't, nor wish to, avoid sharing what we own. Mark Lemley has
written interesting things about this:

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=582602>

I don't think anyone argues for authors to give up the moral
right to their work, but making their work accessible to the
public could be seen as a reasonable requirement to 'pay back'
the public for having had the privilege of receiving public funds
to do their research.

The requirement, however, is not just to make their work publicly
available. That would be easy and can be done by any researcher
with an internet connection with negligible, if any, extra cost
(other than a little time). The requirement is explicitly to have
their work published in a peer-reviewed journal and then to make
it publicly available, with the 'badge of acceptance by the
scientific community' that publishing in such journals conveys,
attached to it.

In organising and enabling the acquisition of that 'badge' is
where publishers play a role, provide a service. The provision of
that service requires effort, the value of that 'badge' needs
development, which costs time and investment, and somehow those
things need to be paid for. Traditionally, this is done via
subscriptions (essentially 'monetising' the copyright that is
transferred by the author to the publisher), but novel, more
straightforward, ways of paying for that service have emerged in
the form of article processing charges, a system of financial
support for journals that can have open access as quite a natural
outcome.

Embargoes are limiting the value of the copyright that is
transferred to the publisher as 'payment' for the service
rendered, as well as decreasing the incentive for authors to pay
for article processing charges. A portion of subscribers (the
size of which will differ by discipline and quite possibly grow
over time) will decide they can afford to wait until after the
embargo is over, and a portion of authors (the size of which will
also differ by discipline) will decide they can also easily wait
until the embargo is elapsed. So- called 'green' is having a
similar effect.

In those scenarios, it will only be a matter of time before
journals will start refusing articles that come neither with the
transfer of sufficiently valuable copyright (read: sufficiently
valuable exclusive rights), nor with money. In fact,
professionally run OA journals already do just that: they don't
consider articles that don't come with payment (with the possible
exception of a small and affordable number of articles coming
from truly impecunious authors, as long as that number stays
small and affordable).

Nobody may care about the journals and publishers, but it is
pretty tough on authors to require them to deliver open access
for their published papers whilst at the same time depriving them
of the financial means to get them published, or, as seems to be
the case, leaving them in limbo in that regard. And the burden of
this requirement on authors without explicitly providing the
relief of means to pay for publication in one way or another, is
not exactly a stimulus for traditional publishers to convert to
OA, or even for OA publishers to expand their capacity quickly.
The Wellcome Trust and HHMI have understood that better.

Jan Velterop

On 29 Oct 2007, at 23:08, Rick Anderson wrote:


 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