RE: NIH issues

["Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Scott,

"Slightly more than 60%" is pretty good.  It's more than Obama 
got.  I expect to see my picture on a new government security. 
The "Esposito" bond does not pay interest; it asserts it.

BTW, I share your interest (!) in Roberto Bolano.

Concerning your blog post, I just read it.  It's terrific and I 
recommend it to anyone interested in this issue.  I am myself not 
at all in the Heather Joseph camp on this one, but I don't know 
if I am wholly or partly (60%?) on the Marty Frank side.  Let me 
put this hypothetical to you.

A governmental agency (the NIH or anything else) says to a 
researcher:  "We are prepared to grant you $500,000 to study 
snails. As a condition of this grant, you are required to file a 
detailed report of your research; a template for this report will 
be provided to you.  That report will be placed on a Web server 
managed by our agency.  Anyone can use this material any way they 
wish for any purpose including commercial exploitation, provided 
that they cite you, cite the agency, and don't change a word 
without your permission.  You may also do anything you want with 
this material, provided that you cite the agency.  You alone may 
change the content."

Will the proposed bill allow for this hypothetical?

I am not asserting that this situation would be a desirable one; 
that's for the agency to determine.  My question is what latitude 
there would be under the law.

Joe Esposito


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of T Scott Plutchak
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 2:11 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: NIH issues

As is often the case, I agree with Joe slightly more the 60% or so.  I don't
think that HR801 says that the government can't require an author to assign
copyright.  It is a slightly more subtle argument -- that it can't require
an author to assign that transfer when the work in question has had
substantial value added through the agency of a third party, which gets back
to Joe's point about editorial review.

The kind of report repository that Joe describes would certainly satisfy the
requirement that the public should have easy access to the results of NIH
funded research, but that's not really what this argument is about.

Further thoughts, based on my presentation at the ER&L Conference last week,
can be found here:
http://tscott.typepad.com/tsp/2009/02/what-i-said-about-public-access-at
-the-erl-conference.html

T. Scott Plutchak

Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences University of Alabama
at Birmingham tscott@uab.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph Esposito
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 5:21 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: NIH issues

Never thought I would be writing this, but the bill to overturn the NIH's
open access policy is wrongheaded, in my opinion.  Now that I have zero
friends among traditional publishers (not that I ever had many), let me
explain.

The current NIH policy, in my view, is terrible, as it takes property it
didn't pay for, namely, the editorial review performed by publishers; and it
is reviewed material that is intended to go into the publicly available
repositories.  The OA activists strongly disagree with my perspective and
will no doubt pounce on this post.

My reading of the "anti-NIH" bill, however, is that it goes too far.  By my
reading it is saying that the government cannot require an author to assign
a copyright.  This I don't understand.  Publishers do this all the time; it
would be a rare publisher that has never used, say, a work-for-hire
agreement.
Is it not reasonable for an organization to say, "We are paying you to do
something and we own what we pay for"?  I personally signed two such
agreements this week, agreeing to assign to clients any intellectual
property I created on their dime.

Where I would have liked the NIH brouhaha to end up is with the NIH creating
a repository (or causing to have one created by a more skillful IT
organization)for reports submitted by resarchers as a condition of funding.
There would be a template for such reports (what to include, length, access
to underlying data, etc.), and the reports would be part of the public
record. Note that these reports would not go through a formal peer review
process unless the individual researcher sought such review.

All reports in the repository would be open for all to use, for any purpose
whatsoever, including commercial exploitation.
Three conditions:  cite the author, cite the NIH, and don't change the text
without the author's approval.  Yes, indeedy, this would have major
structural implications for certain segments of STM publications.

Looks like this is not going to happen.  Blame it on the OA activists, who
asked for too much and now may get nothing.

Joe Esposito