[CNI-COPYRIGHT] Re: "Do not sell to schools" and copyright

> Melissa Belvadi:
> But in the last 10-15 years, some for-profit publishers of scholarly
> journals have gotten, well to speak subjectively, greedy, and increased
> institutional pricing far above the inflation rate, year after year after
> year, causing libraries with modest-to-none budget increases to face a
> genuine crisis. (Everyone on this list knows already about the monopoly
> pricing power inherent in copyright law; that power exists to the hilt
> in the domain of scholarly publishing.)

Nancy Willard:
It seems to me that institutions of higher education are the ones that give these scholarly publications this power and maybe it might be time to take some power back.

Laurie Urquiaga:
I think that the work for hire doctrine could actually provide some solution to this conundrum, but only if the various campus constitutencies get over their 'knee-jerk' responses to it. What if all universities asserted that faculty work was work for hire, but then returned the copyright to the individual faculty members in return for irrevocable, non-exclusive licenses to use/publish the work on campus for academic purposes (perhaps after a 1-year delay)? The exchange would be for consideration, so I think the irrevocable nature of the license would be binding. The individual faculty member would then be able to transfer the copyright to a publisher, if that were required -- but the institution would still have the right to use it and even put it on a campus webserver after publication. I can see the publishers squawking a bit, but if all universities did this together, they wouldn't have much choice but to acceed to the changed reality. It might kill the reprint market (not a bad thing, imo), but probably wouldn't affect up-front subscription purchases unless publishers raised prices to the point that people decided to wait a year for the institutional copy to be made available. I think that the resulting downward pressure would counteract monopolistic rent-seeking. What do you all think?

Laureen C. Urquiaga
Associate Library Director for Access Services Law School Copyright Coordinator

urquiagal[_at_]lawgate.byu.edu Received on Sat Apr 05 2003 - 04:44:23 GMT