On Tue, 16 Nov 1999, Marvin Margoshes wrote: tw> From: Thomas J. Walker <t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu> tw> To find out what those attending my two most recent talks were willing to tw> do to promote free access, I asked in a questionnaire if they would... tw> (3) post their old articles on their home pages without permissions from tw> copyright-holding publishers? [80% would] > mm> Interesting that 80% said that they will break the law. mm> Is ignorance of the law or something else behind this?
I think it is the very opposite of ignorance that is behind this. It is an awakening to what is actually at stake here for research and researchers, and how fundamentally different the copyright function is for the fee/royalty-based literature, for which it was intended, as opposed to the give-away literature that is at issue here: the refereed journal literature. Eighty percent indicate that they will self-archive their papers in any case. (1) This agrees with the 9 years of de facto practise by over 100,000 physicists in the Los Alamos Archive: <http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions> This has led me to formulate the "Los Alamos Lemma": If you think you know an alleged obstacle to public self-archiving -- let us call the obstacle "X" [X could be copyright, preservation, plagiarism, whatever], an obstacle that must allegedly be overcome before we can self-archive, and yet X did NOT stop Los Alamos, then X is not an obstacle to public self-archiving." (2) It agrees with the fact that, unlike books written for royalties or fees, refereed journal articles are and always have been GIVE-AWAYS on the part of their authors. Copyright can be assigned to publishers insofar as SELLING the research reports (on paper or online) is concerned, but authors must certainly retain their right to give their own research reports away for free. Bachrach S. et al. (1998) Intellectual Property: Who Should Own Scientific Papers? Science 281 (5382): 1459-1460. September 4 1998. <http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html> (3) It confirms that the conflict of interest (the "Faustian Bargain") between research and publishers is so great here that there can be no doubt as to the just and inevitable way in which it will be resolved: in favor of research, now that access fees are no longer either the only or the best way to cover the small costs of refereeing and certification. Harnad, S. (1998) On-Line Journals and Financial Fire-Walls. Nature 395(6698): 127-128 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science har...@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM