The potential charge against open archives of using public money to compete
with private enterprise is an interesting one in the context of science
publishing.
A major proportion of scientific research (most, actually) is funded out of the public purse. Shouldn't the results be made available to the very public that paid for it? What intrinsic exclusive right does any private enterprise have to the material? It has only been granted that right by the author, by means of transferring copyright or granting an exclusive licence to publish. Should authors not be prevented from thus 'locking up' research results obtained by scientific experiments with the help of public money? Shouldn't publication of results be seen as an intrinsic and inseparable part of the research itself? After all, the research is probably not even deemed to have taken place if the results are not published.
Publishing costs money, so it stands to reason that publishers, be they private enterprises or not, get a fair compensation for their efforts. They are unlikely to agree to self-archiving if such compensation is not offered. Their economic feasibility must not be completely undermined lest they give up publishing altogether and self-archiving is not likely to fill that gap anytime soon, if ever.
The way to do it is to reverse the economic models, currently based on the selling of output (IPR-mongering: selling access and distribution rights), to models based on selling the *service* of publishing with payment at input (article charges) resulting in open access articles with which self-archives can then be filled to their hearts' content. Given that a research publication is part of the research project itself, the cost of this service should be incorporated in the research grant and the grantee required to make the results available in open access.
Any new journals should be founded on the principle of input-paid open access, but existing ones should be given the chance to make the transition by being offered a reasonable fee for articles to be published with open access to compensate for potential loss of subscription revenue. This will induce them into offering the *option* of open access to those authors who are compelled (by their funders) to publish with open access. If funding bodies take open access seriously, they can precipitate change very rapidly, as publishers would quickly take up the offer to change their models. What else would they do if faced with authors increasingly requiring the option of open access?
There would be no unfair competition with private enterprise. But there would be competition, which the industry now lacks to a large degree. The monopoloid nature of journals - a result of their being unique purveyors of the articles they publish - would be replaced by a proper competitive system, given that the author has choices that the reader has not.
Jan Velterop
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:harnad[_at_]ecs.soton.ac.uk]
> Sent: 17 April 2003 04:38
> To: CNI-COPYRIGHT Mail List
> Subject: [CNI-COPYRIGHT] Re: Central vs. Distributed Archives
>
>
snip
>
> > Now, if we allow documents [to be deposited in {central-archive name
> > deleted} even when 3rd-party-archiving is forbidden in the copyright
> > transfer agreement], the publisher [might] sue [deleted]
> for using public
> > money for unfair competition with private enterprise, and [deleted]
> > will be stopped immediately. Even a mere threat of a lawsuit may be
> > sufficient to put us in a difficult situation.
>
> These are the pitfalls of 3rd-party archiving. If an archive
> is carrying
> content other than its own institutional research output then
> it is (in
> principle -- not in practise: look at the Physics ArXiv, unchallenged
> for well over a decade now) susceptible to claims of re-publishing a
> publisher's copyrighted contents. The solution is simple: Let every
> research institution self-archive only its *own* research output, and
> leave it to OAI-interoperability to do the (virtual)
> integration with the
> research output of other research institutions. One needless retardant
> on self-archiving successfully avoided!
>
> > When I started [central archive-name, deleted], many objections came
> > from all sorts of directions, sometimes contradictory. Now that I
> > have something which exists, I do not want to take risks to see it
> > cancelled. This is why I am careful. As an individual, I
> would take a
> > totally different attitude.
>
> If your archive consisted instead of just a network of independent
> individual, modular institutional (indeed *departmenal*) OAI eprint
> archives, each one reserved for self-archiving by that institute's
> researchers alone, no one would be vulnerable, and nothing
> would be lost.
> http://software.eprints.org/
>
> But don't worry too much anyway. All a publisher can do is request
> that a given paper or papers be removed, if they have in hand a signed
> contract that permits only self-archiving for those papers.
> The authors
> are the ones who archived the paper, so the archive itself is merely
> an ISP, like a bulletin-board, bound only to have the
> designated papers
> removed, if legal cause is shown (e.g., they are pornographic). The
> rest of the papers are fine (and that will be most of them
> anyway). And,
> judging from ArXiv, no publishers will bother to request
> removal anyway!
>
> But true institution-based self-archiving will not only avoid this
> needless nuisance, but it will accelerate and strengthen
> self-archiving.
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
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