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