 |
 |
Danny, Armin Yes Leonardo journals are under the MIT Press system ( I wish they were a multinational, might solve our budget deficit and allow us to pay authors and reviewers !!) and authors retain rights to their own texts with some lexibility as long as we can archive the texts and disseminate them in the systems that MIT Press has set up. We have managed with MIT press to make sure that all 40 years and 6000 articles of leonardo are now available on line= but this access is tied to institutions and individuals that have subscriptions ( for individuals a subscription is the cost of two good bottles of wine a year). Most authors also put their articles openly available on their own web sites. We havent figured out how to migrate to a sustainable model that is not subscription based. Ironically the thing we do now that sells the best is books !!!! One experiment we are trying is Leonardo Transactions= Editor in Chief Ernest Edmonds. Leonardo Transactions will soon have an "open " pre print server when all texts submitted to Leonardo Transactions are immediately available for free on the pre print server. The model here is what happens in my field of astronomy where all researchers deposit their texts into the astro-ph open system while their texts go through review into the archival journals. For what its worth nothing is for free on the internet. Someone is paying for the internet infrastructure and operating costs, and the time of people to keep the system up and running. The model transfers these costs in different ways to different users than in the old subscription publication models, and tax monies are involved in funding a lot of r and d. ( I work in a french government lab and the french tax payer is paying to keep the system running; private individuals pay individually for keeping a system going in their home ) We clearly are evolving to a different system where indeed every author should have all their texts on their own web site or deposited anywhere they can without direct cost to themselves. The problem then for the author is how to get people to read their texts, and get people to pay attention to what they are doing. Clearly the interesting work is rarely appearing in the top 10,000 clips on u tube !! New kinds of tools for this are proliferating ( one forgets that it took decades if not centuries after the invention of print for the systems of books, journal and associated IP to develop; it will presumably take decades after the invention of the internet before semi stable formats and functional IP systems are developed to be consistent with the new situation; The index at the back of a book took for ever to be invented) What a system like Leonardo does at the moment is help bring attention to the work of people who choose to publish in our books our journals or web sites. ( over 100,000 article downloads a year). So the authors who give some kind of rights to Leonardo/MIT Press as part of the current business model ensure that their texts are archived indefinitely in the scholarly on line archives, that their texts get some attention from an intellectual community internationally to the extent the Leonardo system attracts readers focused on the art/science/technology interface. I guess the open/closed discussion always reminds me that none of the approaches we are discussing are in extreme situations and we are in a hybrid system that is evolving . roger Hi Just a note to say that I had an article published in Leonardo where they were prepared to accept a non-exclusive license agreement to publish, rather than transfer of copyright. My experience is that many journals owned by the multinationals will do this if you agitate hard enough for it. The article also appears for free on my website, and has been republished in a book. Of course, access to knowledge is a critical issue, but I think there are a lot of different types of publishing economies out there, and many of us participate in them in different ways at different times. The "old" copyright regime still drives the publishing industry and will for a while yet... Cheers, Danny On 29/04/2008, at 7:28 PM, Armin Medosch wrote: Hi list the problem is, I can never submit a paper to anything done by Leonardo because they adhere to the old copyright regime. I have made a decision, that everything i write is published freely and should be available on the internet without charge. now has this anything to do with FOSS? regards Armin