Sorry for belated response I think it is perfectly reasonable (and in no way a denial of Open Access) for a publisher to wish to retain the right to sell derivative copies of a work, even if in its original form it is made freely available. After all, they've got to recover their costs somehow - and if they recover more from other sources, they will not need to ask authors to pay so much.
Sally NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS - PLEASE UPDATE YOUR RECORDS. THANKS! Sally Morris, Chief Executive Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK Phone: +44 (0)1903 871686 Fax: +44 (0)1903 871457 E-mail: chief-e...@alpsp.org ALPSP Website http://www.alpsp.org Our journal, Learned Publishing, is included in the ALPSP Learned Journals Collection, www.alpsp-collection.org ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lars Aronsson" <l...@aronsson.se> To: <american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org> Sent: Monday, December 15, 2003 11:35 AM Subject: Re: Free Access vs. Open Access > Stevan Harnad wrote: > > And what is meant by "redistribute" when the text is already distributed > > all over the planet on the web, and freely available to anyone who may > > wish to find, search, read, download, process computationally online or > > offline, and print off anywhere in the world, any time? > > This sounds like the beginning of the free-as-beer or free-as-speech > discussion from the GNU project all over again, > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html > > Redistribute means the permission to copy the article and republish it > on another website or on another medium. Some say that this right is > necessary to assure that the contents will be permanently available, > because you cannot trust any one institution to be around for ever. > Most eloquently put, "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload > their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror > it." (http://quote.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds) The crucial > question is then: Do you allow the world to mirror it? > > The conference paper that I have on http://aronsson.se/wikipaper.html > is available for all to read free of charge, but you cannot > copy-and-republish because I own the copyright, and I don't allow free > copying and redistribution. If I find that you store a copy of it on > your openly available website, I will ask you to take it down. > > But free software such as Linux is free to download, republish at your > own website, sell on CDROM or redistribute in *almost* any way. This > is not to say that it is in the public domain, which it is not. It is > owned by its creators and licensed to you under the conditions set > forth in the GNU General Public License. > > > -- > Lars Aronsson (l...@aronsson.se) > Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/
