The proposal in question concerns conjoint holding of copyright by the university and the professor, not by the faculty tenure and promotion committee and the professor. There are many reasons why administrative officers of universities might come to believe that it is best if access to a given professor's work not be encouraged, including -- though by no means limited to -- their disapproval of its contents, regardless of whether it has been accepted for refereed publication or not. As conjoint holders of copyright they need only refuse permission to accomplish that. It is prima facie undesirable to accept this way of handling copyright if the aim is to promote on-line access to scholarly and scientific research. My critical point is that Professor Harnad is (unintentionally) obscuring this very real problem in speaking as if acceptance of the proposal for conjoint copyright is somehow in the spirit of the project at Los Alamos. Since I have made no reference to trade literature and the Los Alamos archive has nothing to do with trade literature, I should hope it is clear enough by now that we are not concerned with that here.
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