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.