From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 18 May 2012 12:51:27 +0100
I am puzzled by some of Kevin's statements. All publishers reading this list
will know of many times when they are alerted to plagiarism by the author of
an article and are expected to take action. I hope he is not claiming that
the emotive anecdote is representative of author attitudes - though he seems
to suggest it is.
Publishers will also know that they are very very unlikely to sue (this is
very much the last resort) but do get retractions or suchlike by pressure -
which is what the authors want. It takes up a lot of time. Note that I am
not saying that they need copyright to do this.
There are all sorts of reasons why publishers need copyright or exclusive
rights. One obvious one is they are asked to undertake that this is their
relationship with the authors in downstream contracts with aggregators (for
example).
I assume Elsevier is being picked on because they make a lot of money and
are the scapegoat but I would be interested to know how what they do in
relation to asking for copyright is different from what learned society
publishers (owned by academics) do when they ask for copyright or exclusive
rights. As an academic author I do not feel I am involved in a tug of war. I
can just ignore mandates. I can just choose a different publisher. I am sure
I am not the only one.
Anthony
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Smith <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 17 May 2012 10:40:07 +0000
Sandy makes some valid and important points. In the interests of
continuing a valuable conversation, let me reply to each.
1). It is true that if authors gave publishers only a non-exclusive
license, authors would have to enforce the copyright. To know how
much of a burden that would be, we would need to know how often
publishers actually do sue to protect the integrity of a work, rather
than its profitability. Authors, of course, would not have the same
need to litigate to preserve a revenue stream, so I imagine that this
burden would actually be very light.
To illustrate how unlikely it is for an author to confront a situation
in which she cares enough to sue, I offer an anecdote about the worst
case of plagiarism/infringement I have seen. A graduate student in a
specialized scientific sub-discipline discovered that an article he
had written and published in a leading journal in that field had been
entirely reprinted under the name of a different scholar in an obscure
journal published in that second scholar's developing and strife-torn
country. As I began to lay out his options, he stopped me and told me
that he did not want to do anything about it, because he had gotten
the credit he needed for his CV and the other scholar was just trying
to make her career, he believed, in circumstances more difficult than
he could imagine. I was dumbfounded, and had to convince him that he
really must at least notify the publisher, who held the copyright by
his assignment.
2). Sandy is again spot on in noting that a publication agreement
cannot create ownership of rights in a third party. But if we are
talking about a non-exclusive license situation, this would be
unnecessary anyway. The author would be free to grant another license
to the institution or funding body.
Where the copyright is transferred to the publisher, Bernard's
suggestion is more applicable. All I think he is really asking is for
publishers to recognize prior obligations that authors have taken on,
including campus OA policies. The current situation puts author is
the middle of a tug of war that they did not create. This is
especially true of Elsevier's attempt to penalize institutions that
adopt OA policies by making life more difficult for faculty authors at
those institutions. Such attempts to meddle with institutional
policies are an unwarranted interference with academic freedom, and
all we really need to ask is for publishers to stop trying to dictate
campus policies that arise prior to any transfer of copyright to those
publishers.
3). When a large commercial publisher reports profits of between 35
and 40%, I think there is room for a moratorium on price increases, at
least with the largest publishers, without the need to slow whatever
expansion is truly needed.
4). I think I should stay out of a debate about excellence, since it
is a matter for the scholars to decide. If we could subscribe title
by title, of course, those scholars would tell us what journals are
not valued by not using them or objecting if their libraries cancelled
them. So perhaps all we need when we have to bundle journals is good,
granular usage statistics and the freedom to cancel titles without
penalty. Over time, that might give the publisher a good idea of
which journals are not valued by the academic community, which is the
opinion that matters.
Kevin L. Smith, J.D.
Director of Scholarly Communication
Duke University
Perkins Library
Durham, NC 27708
On May 16, 2012, at 10:18 PM, "Sandy Thatcher"
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I have no ax to grind in this matter, but would ask the following
questions:
> 1) If authors only give nonexclusive rights to publishers, publishers will
then not have legal standing to sue for infringement, and it will be the
individual author's responsibility to take action and pay all expenses
pertaining thereto. Is that a burden authors wish to bear? (There are at
least some kinds of infringement that authors need to be concerned about, to
protect the integrity of their work.)
> 2) What does "by default" mean? Copyright law defines the owner of
copyright to be the author (or, in the case of a work made for hire, the
employer). There can be no "default" giving any other parties joint
ownership unless a specific written agreement is signed to that effect.
> 3) If subscription costs are held flat for five years, does that mean that
journals cannot expand in length over that period of time? (I understand
that the increase in size of journals is one of the factors that has
contributed to driving up subscription prices.)
> 4) How is the "excellence" of a journal to be assessed? Are journals
reviewed anywhere (except, occasionally, in the Times Higher Education
Supplement)? Who is to tell a publisher which journals to drop?
> Sandy Thatcher
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