From: Fred Jenkins <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2014 20:20:56 -0400

I don't remember actually being asked to sign an agreement by any of
the first three or four journals in which I published; then in the mid
to late nineties most started having agreements, which most of us
signed without reading.  It didn't really make a lot of difference
when our only option for redistribution was a stack of offprints
(getting a PDF is really not the same as opening a package of
offprints bound with a facsimile of the journal cover).  The real
difference now is not only are we able to redistribute articles in
many more ways, but we are actually reading the agreements.  I don't
see why anyone should give a journal eternal and exclusive ownership
without suitable financial compensation (perhaps 3K per article).  I
could see one year exclusive license to publish, with all other rights
retained by the author.  More than generous reward to the publisher
who get content and peer review for free.

Fred W. Jenkins, Ph.D.
Professor and Associate Dean for Collections and Operations
University of Dayton Libraries
106A Roesch Library
Dayton, OH 45469-1360


On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 7:35 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2014 17:07:42 -0400
>
> The response to my posting the Cambridge license for articles in
> Speculum puts me back to my early days renting apartments and reading
> leases.  It struck me forcibly that the best and most generous such
> document I read had still been written by a landlord and all the
> defaults tipped at the end of the day in his favor.  Granted that this
> CUP version has various generous things in it, I would still observe:
>
> 1.  It is very much a CUP boilerplate document, not journal-specific:
> I've looked (try your search engine) at four different journals in
> different fields published by CUP, and they all use this document,
> swapping in the name and address of the journal and otherwise making
> no changes I could detect.  There are other publishers who do better
> (certainly with respect to #3 below).  University presses and journals
> housed so completely in the academic community could aspire to be
> among them.
>
> 2.  I take the point that there are many typical elements to this
> form:  but that's a palliative rather than a positive argument at a
> time when we're trying to understand and advance authors' and readers'
> rights.
>
> 3.  End of the day, the process still transfers ownership of my
> property away from me.
>
> 4.  The actual form (the first page) is for me to sign, making
> commitments to them.  On the third and fourth pages, there are
> assertions of generosity by CUP, but those are not actually part of
> the form that will go in their files, and nobody signs for CUP.  The
> last lines contain the e-mail addresses of the current holders of the
> permissions jobs in UK and US, in case my "reuse is not covered by the
> above," but a year or five from now, those addresses will likely be
> dead.
>
> I may just hang out with too many smart librarians to know what's good
> for me . . .
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> Georgetown U.