COLLOQUY

THE QUESTION

RESPONSES

BACKGROUND

Stevan:

My answer to your question is a resounding, "Of course!."

The strawman proposal that kicked off the Caltech debate was to simply modify the current submission/review/acceptance/publication process by substituting for the publisher's copyright form an Institute copyright assignment document that granted the publisher limited rights and retained "jointly" for the author and the Institute rights to post, use for education/research, disseminate not-for-profit, etc.

The driving issue for me (as I believe it has been for you and many others I've talked with) has not been "university control" of the scholarly record, but rather the prevention of "publisher control" of the scholarly record and the preservation of that record as a common good, freely accessible. I would be happy to see copyright reside solely with the individual scholars, but then there is the associated nuisance of responding to requests for reproduction rights, etc.

There never was (nor will there ever be, at least at Caltech) any suggestion of supression of publication. And none of the Caltech faculty have raised this concern (or at least, I haven't heard it). While the faculty and administration here certainly don't always see eye-to-eye on everything around here, I would expect that there's far too much mutual respect and commitment to academic freedom for that level of paranoia to arise.

Steve Koonin, Provost, California Institute of Technology

-- Stevan Harnad, Professor, Cognitive Science, Southampton University (posted 9/21, 12:20 p.m., E.D.T.)

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