I was speaking of the case where authors have not given their copyright
away to others. For example I own the copyright in all papers I have
published so I can make them available any way I want. Making info
available that has no copyright restrictions eliminates the entire
copyright policing nightmare and associated costs.

You don't need a bespoke front end. You don't need to worry about all
the formats being the same. You don't need to worry about keeping it up
to date. Just use Google. Then all the author has to do it upload their
papers as they write them. Most universities I have been at give
academics web space already.

Regards,

Morgan Leigh
PhD Candidate
School of Sociology and Social Work
University of Tasmania

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] EThOS Service
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 09:22:39 +0000
From: kaostar <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Society for The Academic Study of Magic
<[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]



it's complicated- i was involved in some of the concept and development
of my institution's 'repository' which is the published output of all
academics across all disciplines, free for anyone to access where
publishers allow us to release the material, and it is both costly and a
nightmare- as a rule of thumb the author has copyright, but only of the
words, the *layout* is copyright of the publisher, so you cannot simply
repost a pdf version of a journal article- and some publishers will not
allow reposting at all, either for a year after journal publication, or
ever, and when this *is* possible often we have to use the 'author's
final' version, ie a pdf we make from the last pre-print version the
author sent to the publisher, therefore the page nubmering is shot to
hell compared to the actual journal layout, and any final edits will not
be included, so we have to include that caveat too

and it is expensive- bespoke front end software to run the show, web
hosting space, programmer time to keep it running, someone to work on
indexing to keep it high on the google rankings, copyright law people to
check and write the process and keep it up to date with both UK, US and
World law on the subject, ongoing policy and copyright permissions
communications with every single journal we publish with (many hundreds)
and a continual process of keeping the repository up to date, as
academics are publishing all the time. Factor in the events needed when
someone moves form anothe runi to here (or leaves) and it is fulltime
work- i think out library service now have 3 people employed on the
scheme, and it was more people initially when the repos was being
populated with backdated outputs

every academic hosting their own website with their own work is simply
not feasible- imagine how difficult it would be to search through
something like that, let alone agreement on a format (it took a year to
agree that PDFa is the best format for us, but it might not suit
everyone) ..... the limited facilities for file hosting on academia.edu
aren't bad, but nowhere near enough

dave e


*---------- Original Message -----------*
From: janet ifimust <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 09:09:59 +0000
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] EThOS Service

> Actually, the cost could be very great, indeed - if it were seen to be
infringing copyright. At least one of the journals in which I publish
will not allow us to host our own pre-print papers, while other journals
do. The journal holds the copyright, as I understand it....
>
> On 13 December 2010 00:14, Morgan Leigh <[log in to unmask]
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>

    I am not under any delusion that such things are gratis. But if we can
    > make them libre then we can at least work on facilitating access
    for as
    > many people as possible without commercial profits being factored
    in.
    > Can we as a species afford to restrict our body of knowledge in
    the way
    > we do know? Our next Einstein may be languishing in some poor nation
    > that can't afford such access...
    >
    > On the other hand, the cost to each academic of hosting a web site
    for
    > their work is so small that if we all hosted our own work then there
    > would be no need at all to charge others for access. Libraries
    expenses
    > for accessing work would then be seriously reduced as they would only
    > have to afford the cost of a content aggregation system, and not
    > licensing fees.
    >
    > Regards,
    >
    > Morgan Leigh
    > PhD Candidate
    > School of Sociology and Social Work
    > University of Tasmania


> --
> Dr. Janet Goodall
> Research Fellow
> Institute of Education
> University of Warwick
> http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wie/aboutus/
*------- End of Original Message -------*