JiscMail Logo
Email discussion lists for the UK Education and Research communities

Help for JISC-REPOSITORIES Archives


JISC-REPOSITORIES Archives

JISC-REPOSITORIES Archives


JISC-REPOSITORIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK


View:

Message:

[

First

|

Previous

|

Next

|

Last

]

By Topic:

[

First

|

Previous

|

Next

|

Last

]

By Author:

[

First

|

Previous

|

Next

|

Last

]

Font:

Proportional Font

LISTSERV Archives

LISTSERV Archives

JISC-REPOSITORIES Home

JISC-REPOSITORIES Home

JISC-REPOSITORIES  February 2009

JISC-REPOSITORIES February 2009

Options

Subscribe or Unsubscribe

Subscribe or Unsubscribe

Log In

Log In

Get Password

Get Password

Subject:

Re: John Wiley on RoMEO and John the Baptist on Supererogation

From:

"[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

[log in to unmask]

Date:

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:21:48 +0000

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (153 lines)

Let me make my position clear.  Comments that I make  have no legal authority.  I take no responsibility for any actions a reader might take (or not take) as a result of reading my opinion, and that in any cases of doubt, readers should take formal legal advice. Anyone who advises third parties to do something that is potentially infringing  without such a health warning could find themselves accused by rights owners of authorising infringement, which means they would be just as liable to pay damages as the person who took the advice.

I agree with Talat that 100% OA is not necessarily inevitable, despite my hope that it does come to pass. Just because something is technically possible and makes economic sense does not mean it is bound to occur. 

Charles 


Professor Charles Oppenheim
Head
Department of Information Science
Loughborough University
Loughborough
Leics LE11 3TU

Tel 01509-223065
Fax 01509 223053
e mail [log in to unmask] 
-----Original Message-----
From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Talat Chaudhri
Sent: 17 February 2009 12:51
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: John Wiley on RoMEO and John the Baptist on Supererogation

This may be your view, Stevan, but it is frankly inappropriate to tell others to break the law at their own risk, whatever your views in terms of OA. That is their risk assessment, the business of their institutions and nobody else's. Clearly the copyright system is incoherent and difficult, but nonetheless these publishers have indisputable copyright and may licence it as they please, even incoherently. The upshot is unknown, of course, as nothing has ever been tested, and this may continue for better or for worse, probably a mix of both.

I hope others on this list will agree with me that we should not tell other institutions how to manage their legal liabilities, much as we would not do so for individuals of our personal acquaintance, especially in ignorance of both their specific circumstances and the precise legal situation. No doubt you will continue to do so despite my protestation, but I feel duty bound to voice this complaint on behalf of repository managers and their institutions, amongst whose number I was counted until very recently.

There is no evidence that OA is such a foregone conclusion as you say, much as I would like it to be true as much as you do. We deal here with practical issues, not with your imagined "Zeno's paradox", which nobody but you discusses on this list.


Talat Chaudhri

Stevan Harnad wrote:
> On 17-Feb-09, at 4:32 AM, Ian Stuart wrote:
>
>> Leslie Carr wrote:
>>>
>>> HOWEVER one step away (literally) from the W-B "Best Practice 
>>> document" is the W-B "Copyright FAQ" in which they elaborate that 
>>> although the ELF is used for societies, the wholly owned journals 
>>> still retain the practice of Copyright Assignment. The sample 
>>> Copyright Assignment document (for the aptly chosen International 
>>> Headache Society) contains the following text:
>> > ---- quote ----
>>> Such preprints may be posted as electronic files on the author's own 
>>> website for personal or professional use, or on the author's 
>>> internal university, college or corporate networks/intranet, or 
>>> secure external website at the author's institution, but not for 
>>> commercial sale or for any systematic external distribution by a 
>>> third party (e.g. a listserve or database connected to a public 
>>> access server).
>>> ----- end -----
>>> I *think* that an institutional repository is OK by that definition. 
>>> After all, it is a secre external website at the author's 
>>> institution which is not offering the item for sale nor run by a 
>>> third party.
>>
>> Where does this leave the Subject Repository (ex aXive)?
>> It's not the authors own website, or an intranet at the authors local 
>> institution, or an external server at the authors institution... yet 
>> it also doesn't offer commercial sales or *systematic*[my emphasis] 
>> distribution to a third party
>>
>> Where does this leave the Depot?
>> It's /effectively/ an Institutional Repository, but like aXive it's 
>> not at the authors institution.
>>
>> .... or is this one of those questions one shouldn't really ask?
>
> Here's my tuppence worth on this one -- and it's never failed me (or 
> anyone who has applied it, since the late 1980's. when the 
> possibilities first presented themselves) as a practical guide for
> action: (A shorter version of this heuristic would be "/If the 
> physicists had been foolish enough to worry about it in 1991, or the 
> computer scientists still earlier, would we have the half-million 
> papers in Arxiv or three-quarter million in Citeseerx that we have, 
> unchallenged, in 2009?/"):
>
> *When a publisher starts to make distinctions that are more minute 
> than can even be made sense of technologically, and are unenforceable, 
> ignore them:*
>
> The distinction between making or not-making something freely 
> available on the Web is coherent (if often wrong-headed).
>
> The distinction between making something freely available on the web 
> /here/ but not /there/ is beginning to sound silly (since if it's free 
> on the web, it's effectively free /everywhere/), but we swallow it, if 
> the "there" is a 3rd-party rival free-riding publisher, whereas the 
> "here" is the website of the author's own institution. /Avec les dieux 
> il y a des accommodements/: Just deposit in your IR and port metadata 
> to CRs.
>
> But when it comes to DEPOT -- which is an interim "holding space" 
> provided (for free) to each author's institution, to hold deposits 
> remotely until the institution creates its own IR, at which time they 
> are ported home and removed from DEPOT -- it is now bordering on 
> abject absurdity to try to construe DEPOT as a "3rd-party rival 
> free-riding publisher".
>
> We are, dear colleagues, in the grip of an orgy of pseudo-juridical 
> and decidedly supererogatory hair-splitting/ on which nothing 
> whatsoever hinges but the time, effort and brainware we perversely 
> persist in dissipating on it/.
>
> This sort of futile obsessiveness is -- in my amateur's guess only -- 
> perhaps the consequence of two contributing factors:
>
>     (1) The agonizingly (and equally absurdly) long time during which
>     the research community persists in its inertial state of Zeno's
>     Paralysis about self-archiving (a paralysis of which this very
>     obsession with trivial and ineffectual formal contingencies is
>     itself one of the symptoms and causes). It has driven many of us
>     bonkers, in many ways, and this formalistic obsessive-compulsive
>     tendency is simply one of the ways. (In me, it has simply fostered
>     an increasingly curmudgeonly impatience.) The cure, of course, is
>     deposit mandates.
>
>
> and
>
>     (2) The substantial change in mind-set that is apparently required
>     in order to realize that/ OA is not the sort of thing governed by
>     the usual concerns of either library cataloguing/indexing or
>     library rights-management/: It's something profoundly different
>     because of the very nature of OA.
>
>
> Rest your souls. Universal OA is a foregone conclusion. It is optimal, 
> and it is inevitable. The fact that it is also proving to be so 
> excruciatingly -- and needlessly -- slow in coming is something we 
> should work to remedy, rather than simply becoming complicit in and 
> compounding it, by giving ourselves still more formalistic trivia with 
> which to while away the time we are losing until the obvious happens 
> at long last.
>
> Bref: Yes, this is "one of those questions one shouldn't really ask"!
>
> Yours curmudgeonly,
>
> Your importunate archivangelist
>

--
Dr Talat Chaudhri
------------------------------------------------------------
Research Officer
UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, Great Britain
Telephone: +44 (0)1225 385105    Fax: +44 (0)1225 386838
E-mail: [log in to unmask]   Skype: talat.chaudhri
Web: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/t.chaudhri/
------------------------------------------------------------

Top of Message | Previous Page | Permalink

JiscMail Tools


RSS Feeds and Sharing


Advanced Options


Archives

March 2024
February 2024
January 2024
December 2023
November 2023
October 2023
September 2023
August 2023
July 2023
June 2023
May 2023
April 2023
March 2023
February 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022
October 2022
September 2022
August 2022
July 2022
June 2022
May 2022
April 2022
March 2022
February 2022
January 2022
December 2021
November 2021
October 2021
September 2021
August 2021
July 2021
June 2021
May 2021
April 2021
March 2021
February 2021
January 2021
December 2020
November 2020
October 2020
September 2020
August 2020
July 2020
June 2020
May 2020
April 2020
March 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
June 2019
May 2019
April 2019
March 2019
February 2019
January 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
September 2018
August 2018
July 2018
June 2018
May 2018
April 2018
March 2018
February 2018
January 2018
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
August 2017
July 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016
August 2016
July 2016
June 2016
May 2016
April 2016
March 2016
February 2016
January 2016
December 2015
November 2015
October 2015
September 2015
August 2015
July 2015
June 2015
May 2015
April 2015
March 2015
February 2015
January 2015
December 2014
November 2014
October 2014
September 2014
August 2014
July 2014
June 2014
May 2014
April 2014
March 2014
February 2014
January 2014
December 2013
November 2013
October 2013
September 2013
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
April 2013
March 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
July 2012
June 2012
May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
November 2005
October 2005


JiscMail is a Jisc service.

View our service policies at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/ and Jisc's privacy policy at https://www.jisc.ac.uk/website/privacy-notice

For help and support help@jisc.ac.uk

Secured by F-Secure Anti-Virus CataList Email List Search Powered by the LISTSERV Email List Manager