From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2016 02:42:09 +0000 >It seems unarguable to me that copyright law as it is >currently formulated and enforced does not serve scholarly authors very >well. It is designed for large content industries, not for authors who >want to reach the largest possible audience and have little hope of >financial remuneration. But Kevin, you’re assuming that scholarly authors, in general, are attempting to reach the largest possible audience with their work. I’m not sure that’s self-evident at all. On the contrary, we regularly see scholarly authors making the very deliberate choice to place their work in publications that are aimed at small, specialized audiences and that reach only those who pay for access to them. There was once a time when you might have been able to argue that authors settled for those very limited venues because they were the only ones available, but that hasn’t been true for many years now. If a scholarly author wants to make her work freely available to all, she has only to put it on the open web instead of submitting it to a publisher. The fact that scholarly authors tend instead to go to great efforts to place their work in specialized and limited publishing venues suggests that they have primary goals other than making their work available to the largest possible audience. But suppose a scholarly author did want simply to reach the largest possible audience. Copyright law, as currently written, does nothing at all to stop any author from making her work freely available to all. --- Rick Anderson Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication Marriott Library, University of Utah [log in to unmask]