Stevan Harnad's statement that Provost Koonin's initiative is "being pursued implicitly by all researchers who submit their preprints and reprints to the Los Alamos Physics Preprint Archive" appears to be based on a misunderstanding. The proposal described in The Chronicle is that "Caltech and its faculty members jointly own and retain rights to journal articles and license those copyrights to publishers on a limited basis." The key factor here is that there be JOINT ownership by faculty members AND the institution, and what would this mean in practice if not that the institution had effective control over the individual professor's copyright and future distribution? This is fundamentally contrary to the principle underlying the Los Alamos archive and -- I would have thought -- fundamentally at odds with Professor Harnad's own frequently and emphatically stated convictions about authors and copyright. Given the extraordinary esteem in which Professor Harnad's views on this are held, and for good reason, some clarification of this point is surely in order.
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