Until yesterday I was rather strongly of the opinion that Universities
should retain the copyright in primary journal articles written by their
academic staff, or that the academics should retain it personally, rather
than transfer it to the publishers, for the usual reason that it seems
inequitable to give away your intellectual property for nothing and then
have to buy it back again.
However, at yesterday's ACORN Seminar in London, the point was made that
when third parties seek copyright permissions for reproduction of material,
it is much easier and quicker for this to be done if the publisher actually
owns all the copyrights. As more and more of them are retained by authors
or their employers, the process of obtaining permissions gets slower and
more cumbersome and expensive, especially if the author holds the rights
personally and has moved on or died!
Although I still hold my original view in principle, I can see that here are
practical problems involved if *not* transferring copyrights becomes the
norm. It was suggested yesterday that various intermediaries, such as the
CLA (Copyright Licensing Agency) or subscription agencies might provide
copyright clearance services in such a future scenario.
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Fytton Rowland, Lecturer, and Programme Tutor for
Information and Publishing Studies,
Department of Information and Library Studies,
Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leics LE11 3TU, UK.
Phone (direct line) +44 (0) 1509 223039 Fax +44 (0) 1509 223053
E-mail [log in to unmask]
http://info.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/staff/frowland.html
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