Authors "Victorious" in UnCover Copyright Suit (Stevan Harnad) Marcia Tuttle 10 Aug 2000 12:57 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 09:53:08 +0100 From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@COGLIT.ECS.SOTON.AC.UK> Subject: Authors "Victorious" in UnCover Copyright Suit >>From LJ Digital > >Authors Victorious in UnCover Copyright Suit (July 31, 2000) > >A group of authors have won their two-year-old copyright suit against the >UnCover document delivery operation. A California court ruled on July 26 >that UnCover must secure copyright permission from and pay royalties >directly to an author before using that person's work to fill requests from >customers, instead of relying on the original publisher to compensate the >authors. UnCover said it will set up licensing agreements with authors for >semi-annual payments. A web site -- http://www.uncoversettlement.com -- is >being launched July 31, so authors can search to see if their work was >illegally resold and to provide abused authors with information in >collecting their share of the $7.25 million settlement. Insofar as books are concerned, nolo contendere. But insofar as refereed journal articles are concerned, this lawsuit and its "victorious" outcome for researchers represents nothing but short-sighted nonsense. Journal articles are author GIVE-AWAYS; the average refereed journal article (this is a free estimate, but unlikely to be far from the truth) has, let's say, 25 readers, and zero citations (apart from self-citations), in its entire life-cycle. (Authors for whom UnCover raises that number by 1 or 2 are not "abused"!) Collaborating in the raising of yet another needless access-barrier between these no-market give-aways and that tiny potential readership (and correspondingly tiny research impact), over and above the one the primary publisher already needlessly erects there in the form of Subscription/Site-License/Pay-per-View (S/L/P) tolls is, in the On-Line, Post-Gutenberg age, not only self-defeating but downright absurd, for researchers whose primary, secondary, and tertiary interest is only to maximize the impact of their research findings! Researchers should not be striving to collect the few pennies that can be squeezed out of those needless impact-barriers: that only makes their bargain all the more Faustian! They should be striving only to ELIMINATE those gratuitous impact-barriers entirely, first, by publicly self-archiving all their give-away research papers online in Open Archives (http://www.openarchives.org & http://www.eprints.org) and, second, by not signing away their online self-archiving rights in the first place -- although even if they do, there are completely legal ways to get around restrictive copyright agreements and hence to self-archive anyway, through a combination of self-archiving the preprint before refereeing and linking a "corrigenda" file to them after: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html The myopia of the research cavalry is a real head-shaker, sometimes... -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science harnad@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.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org