On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 3:48 AM, Charles Oppenheim <c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk> wrote (in JISC-REPOSITORIES):
Arthur [Sale] is wrong on his final point. When an author assigns copyright to a publisher, the author gives away all rights. It is equivalent to selling your house, your car or anything else. Once you've sold it, you've no right to enjoy it's use any more, even though you were the previous owner. So when an author assigns copyright to a publisher, he or she has no rights to keep a back up copy, store it in a repository, etc., UNLESS the publisher graciously gives permission for the author to do so. But what the publisher cannot do is demand deletion, etc., of earlier drafts of the manuscript, because the author has only assigned the final accepted version to the publisher. With all due respect, if this were true, then the author could not keep and store a paper copy of the final draft of his book in his attic either (or, for that matter, his author's copy of the published book). And, as we all know, "earlier drafts" are a slippery slope. The "penult," which is the refereed draft minus the copy-editing is an earlier draft. So is an author's draft incorporating corrections. No, the new medium has features that cannot be coherently, let alone confidently described, let alone prescribed and proscribed, in this papyrocentric way. The self-archiving computer scientist (since the 80's) and physicist (since the '90s) authors had it right: "Don't ask, Don't Tell, Don't Fret, Just Do." Otherwise you will elicit a welter of inconsistent, and in many cases incoherent opinion and counter-opinion whilst you languish in a chronic state of Zeno's Paralysis (as 85% of us foolishly persist in doing, for nigh on two decades now). And while I'm in the pulpit, let me also point out that the main reason for deposit mandates is not to force research authors to do something they don't really want to do (a few extra bureaucratic keystrokes, as some of the stalwart defenders of "academic freedom" seem to imagine), for they all want to maximise the usage and impact of their research (as a half-century of keystrokes fulfilling reprint-requests proves): It is to free these special authors from the irrational inhibitions that keep them in their state of Zeno's Paralysis. Apologies for this interruption. Please return to your solemn discussion of angels, heads and pins... Stevan Harnad Charles On Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:01:59 +1100 Arthur Sale <a...@ozemail.com.au> wrote: Talat Let me assure you that you should credit that a court would accept a case that repositories fulfil other functions. Indeed in Australia we could argue that they are required by the Federal Government for the purpose of institutional publication reporting and research evaluation. Tasmanian law requires the university to keep records for long-term preservation under the Archives Act and so do most States. The other point you miss is that publishers have no rights to prohibit a restricted copy being mounted in a repository. If an author chooses to keep a copy of his or her article in one computer system or another (or is required to place a copy in a particular one) is of no concern whatsoever to a publisher. They might as well demand that the author delete the manuscript from their personal PC once it has been published! Indeed my departmental backup system makes regular copies from my PC somewhere and I don't bother enquiring where, nor does any publisher of my work. Neither do they demand that a particular filing cabinet be used for any paper drafts. None of this is of any concern to a publisher. You and I have had this argument before and you persist in this view, but it cannot go unchallenged if you keep making it. It does not stand up to examination. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania