COLLOQUY

THE QUESTION

RESPONSES

BACKGROUND

Fortunately his posting suggests a simple empirical test:

[Harnad's] closing suggestion that the university's co-ownership be only formalized in the publication agreement/licensing itself (i.e., at point of publication), and that the author's right to archive publicly in perpetuo be a permanent component of all such agreements/licenses sounds fine except that it is not clear why a university would want to cooperate in copyright which had such a proviso in it, effectively nullifying their control, and it seems very unlikely to me that many administrations would in fact agree to such a simple relinquishment of the power normally associated with copyright.

Let this question be put explicitly to the proponents of scholar/university co-ownership of copyright (for refereed journal articles), beginning with Professor Koonin of Cal Tech and Professor Ira Fuchs of Princeton, who likewise attended the 1997 Conference on Scholarly Communication at Cal Tech organized by Koonin and attended by the Provosts from the major US Universities:

Would you cooperate in copyright which had such a proviso in it?

If the answer is yes, then I think my interpretation of the motivation of Koonin and his fellow-provosts is vindicated; if the answer is no, then we are indebted to Professor Ransdell for identifying a second Trojan Horse. (The first was the one implicit in the "hybrid scenario" described in the unpublished summary of my own contribution to the 1997 Cal Tech Provosts' conference, below.)

"A SUBVERSIVE PROPOSAL: THE NEW PARADIGM FOR SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION"

The publishers of learned journals have the following hybrid scenario for the transition from paper to electronic publishing: Produce both versions, and offer paper-plus-electronic subscriptions for slightly more than paper-only, and electronic-only subscriptions for slightly less. This allows supply and demand to decide which version is preferred, and offers a seamless transition to electronic-only if and when its time comes. Variants of this scenario include site-licensing or pay-per-view in place of subscriptions, but, without exception, all these scenarios continue to regard learned articles as a trade commodity to be sold to readers and protected from "theft" by copyright laws. This trade model entails and has always entailed, a conflict of interest between the publisher and the nontrade researcher/author. In the Gutenberg era, when print-on-paper was the only option, the conflict of interest was resolved in favor of the publisher, whose real costs and a fair profit could only be covered by restricting access to those who paid (whereas the author would have preferred that everyone everywhere have access for free). I have called this the "Faustian Bargain" (which is rather like advertisers being forced to make potential clients pay to see their ads!). The PostGutenberg era of "Scholarly Skywriting" -- networked electronic publication, free for all -- has at last made it possible for nontrade authors (those who ask and receive no royalties, and whose readership is a small population of fellow researchers) to free themselves from the Faustian Bargain. They can archive their unrefereed preprints on the Net and can substitute for them the refereed, published reprint after peer review, editing, and mark-up. This is the gist of my "Subversive Proposal." The only problem is that the cost of implementing peer review, editing and mark-up is still being borne by paper journal publishers, who continue to cling to the trade model, and whose subscription revenues are at risk if the Net becomes the preferred means of access. These costs are medium-independent and low enough to make it more productive to recover them on the authors' end (as page charges, covered by the grant that funded the research itself and/or from authors' institutions' savings on canceled paper journal subscriptions). Paper publishers will have to scale down to the reduced costs of electronic-only publication or their editorial boards will defect and reconstitute themselves with new electronic-only publishers who are prepared to adopt the nontrade, page-charge model, yielding free access to the learned periodical literature for everyone, as it had always meant to be.

-- Stevan Harnad, Professor, Cognitive Science, Southampton University (posted 9/21, 11 a.m., E.D.T.)

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