From: SANFORD G THATCHER <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2018 03:25:44 -0400

John Willinsky's case for a distinctive type of IP for scholarly work does
not--in this interview at least (I have not read the book)--confront the
problem of what counts as scholarly work for this purpose.  There are a
substantial number of books written by faculty who publish them as "trade
books" with commercial publishers that are indistinguishable--except for the
breadth of audience appeal and sales potential--from academic monographs
published by university presses (which themselves regularly publish some
books
to which they assign trade discounts).  Does Willinsky want to remove such
general-interest books from the commercial marketplace? Why would he want
to do
so? This would certainly be to deny faculty the right to make decisions
about
how best to make their works available to the general public.

Or does he want to bracket out books of all kinds and just apply this new
type
of IP to journal articles? But even some journal articles have proven to be
very profitable to their authors, as reprints in anthologies, for example.
(I
can cite an article published in a journal we published at Penn State that
earned its author well over $10,000 in such reprint fees.)  And no one
should
forget the success that Harry Frankfurt had in turning a journal article
into a
short book "On Bullshit" and selling over 300,000 copies courtesy of
Princeton
University Press!

Establishing a "gift economy" by legislative fiat also seems a roundabout
way
of accomplishing a goal that universities have always had it in their power
to
accomplish directly, viz., by fully subsidizing the operation of their
university presses (as has indeed happened recently with the launching of
the
fully subsidized Amherst College Press).  It also seems roundabout to set up
publishing companies within libraries when there are already some 100
presses
operating at universities today.  Why reinvent the wheel? Just remove the
market incentives that presses have been compelled to have for a long time
by
their parent universities and the problem is solved.

Finally, it astonishes me that someone in the HSS fields like Willinsky
goes to
bat so strongly for CC BY when it should be  apparent that every faculty
member
in these fields has very good reason to want to exercise control over some
reuses of their work, as in translation. Authors have a strong stake in
making
sure that translations are done well and accurately. Denying them this
"traditional" right through a CC BY license seems counterproductive and not
in
keeping with the protection of important academic values such as integrity.
BOAI got off on the wrong foot by addressing the needs and concerns only of
STEM scholars and inappropriately generalizing from them to implicate all
scholars in their campaign for a certain type of OA.

Perhaps Willinsky has addressed some or all of these concerns in his book. I
did not see them addressed in the interview, however, and they raise
questions
in my mind about how effective his proposed strategy could be.

Sandy Thatcher




On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 05:00 PM LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2018 16:08:20 +0000
>
>Sixteen years ago, the Budapest Open Access Initiative predicted the dawn
>of a new age of scholarly communication. Its declaration begins, “An old
>tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an
>unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of
>scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in
>scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge.
>The new technology is the internet.”
>
>Looking back, we might want to suggest that OA advocates spent too much
>time in the early years promoting the merits of *openness*, and too little
>time working out the best way of marrying *the old tradition* with the *new
>technology*. In addition, more time should have been spent on establishing
>what other old traditions of learning would need to be accommodated (and
>how) if the new world of scholarly communication that BOAI envisaged was to
>be realised. That too little consideration was given to these matters
>doubtless explains why so much confusion surrounds open access today, and
>why we are seeing growing frustration with it.
>
>In light of this, a new book by John Willinsky – The Intellectual
>Properties of Learning, A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke – is
>timely.
>
>More here: https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/the-
>intellectual-properties-of-learning.html