> 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!
This has worried me for some time. However, it is clear that publishers do
not at least currently provide either an easy or a fast method of clearing
copyrights, and in many cases do not hold all the required rights. They
often seem reluctant to clear rights one suspects the authors would be
happy to clear. So the status quo does not work as we would wish it.
We need to move towards a new system which works better. If authors do
retain their rights and merely license publishers, it will be important
that the issue of tracking copyright ownership and getting clearance is
addressed. One possibility is to use organisations representing authors,
such as ALCS in the UK. So when you license the publisher to print you
also license ALCS to clear rights under certain conditions.
Of course, many advocate going even further, and making the material
freely available via the Internet. There are obvious problems in this. If
you retain current models of peer review and the journal status hierarchy,
there has to be a way to pay the costs of organisation, editorial,
publishing etc. Perhaps up-front fees for publication with no user charges
might work in the coming world, but getting there from here is not an easy
road to map out. If you like the idea of a virtually free pre-print
system, how does the quality assurance of peer review etc fit into this?
If there were easy answers to these we would have them by now. In
practice, relatively few academics will forego the chance to publish in a
prestige journal, whatever rights they have to sign away and whatever
price is charged to the library (we now have the >$10,000 pa journal
subscription, I believe). Until these attitudes change the current system
remains entrenched.
--
Chris Rusbridge
Programme Director, Electronic Libraries Programme
The Library, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
Phone 01203 524979 Fax 01203 524981
Email [log in to unmask]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|