Subject: Re: Library Link discussion (fwd)
Guedon Jean-Claude (guedon@ERE.UMontreal.CA)
Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 10:28:02 -0500 (EST)
Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 10:28:02 -0500 (EST) From: Guedon Jean-Claude <guedon@ERE.UMontreal.CA> Subject: Re: Library Link discussion (fwd) To: arl-ejournal@arl.org In-Reply-To: <701FFCC0F2D3D111A09B006097D552148B9E98@lister2.lhl.uab.edu> Message-Id: <Pine.3.89.9902061048.H22655-0100000@esi25.ESI.UMontreal.CA>
On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, T. Scott Plutchak <tscott@lister2.lhl.uab.edu> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Feb 05, 1999, Jean-Claude Guedon <guedon@ere.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Carol Goodson <cgoodson@westga.edu> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Tony Barry <tonyb@dynamite.com.au> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Even better - do NOT submit you papers to ...
> > > > _any_ journal that restricts your right to republish your own
> > > > writing.
> > >
> > > I believe that if you continue to hold all rights to your work,
> > > it limits the journal publisher from making deals with commercial
> > > indexers to include the journal content in published indexes
> > > and/or full-text databases... although I'm as eager to profit
> > > as the next person, I think I ultimately prefer what I write to
> > > be retrievable by others, and thus possibly useful.
> >
> > Two answers to Ms Goodson's objections:
> >
> > 1. Why would there be problems to indexing articles whose rights are
> > held by the author and not the publisher? Indexing is not copying and
> > I can hardly imagine an author refusing to be indexed. And I am not
> > even sure he could legally refuse if there is nothing malevolent in
> > the act. At the same time, I do not see present copyright laws having
> > anything to do with indexing. Librarians, so far as I know, never
> > asked anyone if they wanted to catalog books and articles; the
> > Colorado consortium never asked journals whether they had the right
> > to index their tables of contents; they dealt with journal only when
> > they decided to offer a fax or electronic delivery of articles.
> >
> > 2. If commercial indexers do not want to do it, libraries could do it.
> > It could become a new cataloguing task of libraries and if they divide
> > the task intelligently among themselves, the work could be fairly
> > light and routine. Another good example of the implementation of a
> > distributed intelligence society.
>
> Copyright does not affect the indexing of articles. Abstracts (often
> included in online bibliographic databases) are another matter. If
> authors reserve the copyrights to their abstracts, then bibliographic
> database producers will need to deal individually with those authors to
> get rights to reproduce the abstracts. Similarly, if the author retains
> all rights but first serial publication, it will complicate the
> licensing of full-text.
>
> Having said that, however, these are solveable issues. Copyrights are
> segmented all the time in the trade & entertainment industry where one
> pays considerable attention to exactly what rights one is selling
> (publication in hardback in US, for example, while reserving rights to
> publication in other countries, paperback publication, serialization,
> dramatization based on, etc., etc., etc...) In the scholarly publishing
> world, however, we have tended to look at it as all or nothing -- which
> is only to the benefit of the commercial publishers. Scholars need to
> become much more savvy about what the value of their copyrights really
> is and then work through their institutions and their professional
> societies to parcel those rights out in ways that enhance the
> distribution of scholarly information. Your right, as a
> scholar/scientist, to your intellectual property, is one of the most
> important and powerful tools you have. We need to learn how to use
> these tools wisely, to the benefit of the scholarly enterprise.
Thank you, Mr. Plutchak. Your answer does clarify the issue.
Incidentally, I do not see why scholarly authors would want to
retain more than their moral rights over a scholarly text they
have written, since they are not paid for it (I am not talking
about manuals, reference works and the like; I am talking research
pieces appearing in scholarly journals). By moral right, I mean the
right to have one's name associated to a given text and the right to
see the integrity of the text respected. A fortiori, authors would
be delighted to see their articles abstracted all over the landscape.
Incidentally, I assume most authors would love having their articles
published more than once in various locations. In my own journal,
Surfaces (http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces), we leave the
copyright in the hands of the authors; we do not mind if they publish
their piece elsewhere; we ask, but only as a matter of courtesy, that
the place of first publication be mentioned. After all, many journals
routinely accept that articles be reprinted within anthologies in the
interest of research and teaching. Extending the principle should not
be very difficult. Once again, the aim of scholarly publishing is not
to create economic value through artificially putting a lid on
distribution through cost; it is to create intellectual value by
multiplying copies and sites. If people make the effort to republish
a given article, it must have some (intellectual) value in some
quarters.
Best to all,
jc
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Jean-Claude Guedon Tel. 514-343-6208
Departement de litterature comparee Fax. 514-343-2211
Universite de Montreal
CP 6128, Succursale "Centre-ville" Surfaces
Montreal, Qc H3C 3J7
Canada http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/
See you at INET'99, San Jose, June 22-25, 1999
http://www.isoc.org/inet99
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