On 7/8/98, Edward Barrow <edward[_at_]plato32.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I absolutely agree with this analysis, but it's not entirely
> complete. "Academic types" are not directly paid for their writings;
> instead the (inaccurate) perception is that they are purloined by
> rapacious publishers and sold back to the academic community at a huge
> cost. The fault lies not with copyright but - if at all - with the
> failure of "academic types" to exact reasonable terms for the stuff
> that they (or their community) own in the first place.
We're not paid directly, but we are paid. We get raises, promotion and tenure based on those publications. In essence, the Universities subsidize the publishers of academic writings, by paying the authors (in salaries) enough that publishers don't have to. By that reasoning, however, publishers of scholarly material are already receiving, albeit indirectly, a portion of students' tuition payments and any public money appropriated to the Colleges and Universities that employ the academic authors. (If the publisher uses a peer review mechanism to evaluate manuscripts for publication, then there is the additional subsidy involved in the compensation to peer reviewers.) Thus, it doesn't seem so unreasonable that schools and students may object to paying multiple times for access to works that they helped to subsidize in the first instance.
What's interesting to contemplate is at what point the expense of buying licenses for scholarly and student use of scholarly material, and the perception that publishers have placed unreasonable limitations on scholarly and student use, will cause Universities to seek alternatives to traditional publishers. The credential value conferred by a publisher (especially one who uses the peer review process) is considerable, but many of the peer reviewers are already on Unviersity payrolls. Once it becomes fully respectable to publish via the world wide web, much of the publication expense is something the University is already committed to paying as part of its general overhead. Moreoever, while some authors might prefer conventional publication, in the United States we have the "work made for hire" doctrine. I don't want to reopen the perennial argument over whether (absent a signed writing to the contrary) schools own the copyright to the scholarship of their faculties -- but if those of us who have argued that faculty writings are works made for hire turn out to be right, the Universities will be in an excellent position to require faculty members to make electronic copies of their scholarship available.
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