Re: The Urgent Need to Plan a Stable Transition/3

[Ann Okerson <aokerson@pantheon.yale.edu>]

And the third message in this series from amsci-forum ...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1998 17:24:34 -0400
From: Mark Doyle <doyle@aps.org>
To: SEPTEMBER-FORUM@AMSCI-FORUM.AMSCI.ORG
Subject: Re: The Urgent Need to Plan a Stable Transition

Hi,

On Fri, 4 Sep 1998, Arthur Smith wrote:

> So I find myself in the unexpected position of agreeing somewhat more with
> Bloom (who I've argued with in the past) than Blume (who I work for). Such
> is life...

I have the fortune of being in the reverse position. But I think Arthur
agrees with the APS's current approach of being a benevolent copyright
owner -- we don't restrict authors from circulating their work on e-print
servers and homepages, we certainly don't embargo scientific discourse,
and it is quite rare that we turn down a request to reprint an article or
figure or whatever. So the differences between me, Arthur, and Blume are
smaller than one might think.

There are two approaches to copyright: The first is that the author cedes
it to someone else who can then turn around an immediately grant back to
the author many rights (as the APS currently does). The other is for the
author to retain the copyright and just turn over a limited portion of the
rights to a publisher (as argued in the Science article). I tend to agree
with the latter point of view, but in practice for the APS and its authors
there has been little difference as we live in the middle ground with
authors getting back most of the rights they want. Of course, there are
many other science publishers where there is a large difference and since
not all copyright-holding publishers are what I would call benevolent, I
think there is more to be gained from letting authors hold copyrights,
than from giving it to publishers.

> As Floyd Bloom points out, there are two possible clear intellectual owners
> of a scholarly work; the author who writes it (or the author's employer)
> and the editor (employed by a journal, owned by a publisher) who evaluates,
> places, and in many cases helps shape it. The contributions of both are
> inextricably intertwined in the final product. The publisher spends
> up to $1000 on the editing process for each scholarly article published -
> this is in many cases more than the author has spent in time on the actual
> article, although the research reported in the article could have cost
> tens, hundreds, or thousands of times more. Ideally both publisher
> and author (or author's employer) should share in copyright ownership -
> is this possible, and would this be a useful middle ground?

I don't agree with the thrust of this. I think the main point is that if a
license to publish allows a publisher to recover the costs from the
publishing of the article (and even, gasp, profit from it), why should a
publisher have rights beyond that, especially if they are used to restrict
the free flow of scholarly discourse? And if the future does bring about
the a new economic model in which it is the author who covers the costs of
peer-review, then the publisher has even less reason to control the flow
of information.

> Right now, either through current schemes or the proposal under discussion,
> sharing is done by ownership on one side and licensing without ownership on
> the other. The fact that the license in the proposal is nonexclusive is
> potentially very damaging to the publishers' rights. Is it a revocable
> license? Could publishers be forced to pay authors for continued use of a
> license? (Oops that would make scientific authors paid for their words...)

It is important (and the article says this, no doubt because of Blume)
that publishers should have a license sufficient to create future new
products from the articles (perhaps not even envisioned at the time of
publication) and to provide information about the article, or even the
article itself, to third parties (even for a charge - I have in mind
digital libraries that would like to index our SGML so that it can be
searched with hits linking back to the online journals). But there is no
harm in this, as these products will enhance access to the author's work
and the costs for doing this will be recouped from the product itself, not
by depriving the author of any earnings.

Mark Doyle
APS Research and Development