From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2016 22:54:11 -0600

I guess the best way for me to reply is to refer you to my article
titled "On the Author's Addendum," which originally appeared in
Against the Grain (June 2008):

https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vr511.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: Marcus A Banks <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2016 22:45:05 +0000
>
> Sandy, I am referring to the articles published in bioscience journals
> like Science or Cell, for which the authors transfer their copyright
> as a condition of publication.
>
> Obviously such a transfer grants a publisher legal entitlement to
> copyright, but we could see a different scenario in which authors
> retain their copyright and license publication.
>
> In the current scenario the individual(s) who do the intellectual
> labor no longer control the rights to their own work. In my view this
> grants a publisher legal copyright but not "moral authority." This is
> why I perceive an intractable conflict between author rights and
> copyright retention for publishers. I am very interested in why you do
> not see it this way.
>
> This entire conversation assumes that publication in a traditional
> journal is required for disseminating an idea or research output --
> which it certainly is in a "publish or perish" sense, but not
> technically. Elsevier's power against SciHub ultimately rests on the
> fact that scholars are still wedded to a publication model that
> pre-dates the Web. Thinking beyond the PDF and monograph, my hope is
> that publishers and librarians can work together to build and promote
> services for Web-enabled scholarship.
>
> Marcus Banks
> Blaisdell Medical Library, UC Davis
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2016 23:23:43 -0600
>
> Please explain what you mean by querying whether publishers'  IP is
> legitimate. I have been a strong advocate of OA for more than two
> decades, but i also have been a member of the Copyright Committee of
> the Association of American Publishers since 1974. I do not see any
> contradiction in being both.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
>
>
>>  From: Marcus A Banks <[log in to unmask]>
>>  Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2016 05:00:58 +0000
>>
>>  Agree -- data/text mining requires different understandings. "Normal"
>>  usage as defined by whom, and for what agenda?
>>
>>  Obviously publishers will seek to protect their IP from entities such
>>  as SciHub, but of course the entire debate surrounding open access is
>>  whether that IP is legitimate. Which depends on which side of the
>>  fence you stand on.
>>
>>  The OA debate is now very stale. And the writing is on the wall for
>>  immediate OA in the biosciences -- embargos will become a thing of
>>  history.
>>
>>  I hope that, going forward, the revenue streams for publishers
>>  transition from licensing and APC schemes into licensing tools for
>>  data/text mining on top of an open corpus. -- Marcus