Re: ALPSP Maximising your Secondary Rights, London, 7th December, 2011

["FrederickFriend" <ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk>]

My thanks to Joe and to Pippa for their clarifications of the 
term "secondary rights". Joe's last two examples do in fact go 
into territory which can cause not only librarians but also 
teachers and researchers some concern. Many in the academic 
community do not feel that they should have to pay publishers for 
use in teaching of articles they and their colleagues have 
written. It is a basic feature of teaching that you introduce 
your students to the latest research, and it goes against the 
grain to have to pay for such re-use.

Also, I can understand payment being justified if a 
computer-indexed database of articles is sold for profit, but 
there are many such possible re-uses which help to improve 
research productivity and which do not involve anybody making a 
profit from the re-use of research reports, for example using 
techniques such as text-mining. I still feel that this is 
sensitive territory. Maybe if librarians, researchers and 
teachers could see the price increases being reduced because of 
the income from secondary rights we would not be as suspicious, 
but there is no visible relationship at present, so it just looks 
like more exploitation of the academic community.

Fred Friend


-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Esposito
Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2011 12:59 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: ALPSP Maximising your Secondary Rights, London, 7th December,
2011

Fred,

Secondary rights are for markets outside of libraries (if your 
primary market is libraries, which is the case for most 
journals).  The greater the income for secondary rights, the less 
pressure to impose price increases in the primary market.  An 
example of secondary rights would be selling the rights for 
translations, putting journal articles into coursepacks for 
course adoptions, and licensing a database of articles in a 
particular domain to help train a computer algorithm to improve 
search results.

Joe Esposito

On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 6:12 PM, FrederickFriend
<ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:

> I find it rather insensitive that this training event has been 
> advertised on a list which includes many librarians and others 
> from institutions from whom the revenues may well be acquired. 
> Is not the ALPSP list or other publishing lists the place for 
> such messages? If the authors of the content in question are 
> publicly-funded researchers or teachers, the "exploitation" is 
> derived from rights which those authors have been under 
> pressure to sign away to publishers. It could be argued that it 
> is the authors who are being exploited.
>
> Fred Friend