Re: Authors "Victorious" in UnCover Copyright Suit (Mike Holderness) Marcia Tuttle 10 Aug 2000 16:10 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 15:33:00 +0100 From: Mike Holderness <mch@cix.compulink.co.uk> Subject: Re: Authors "Victorious" in UnCover Copyright Suit In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.3.95.1000810085625.17089C-100000@cogito.ecs.soton.ac.uk> Stevan Harnad <harnad@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk> writes, concerning the UnCover ruling: > 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"!) Once more, with feeling: How you perceive this ruling clearly depends on what place you occupy in the writing economy/ies, and how you use UnCover. Stevan indeed writes papers as give-aways, having a salary which is in part influenced by citation. I infer from what he writes above that he uses UnCover (&co) largely to locate papers by others occupying the same niche. I write articles to make a living, as a freelance. I use UnCover (&co) largely to locate articles written by journalists. From time to time I discover my own work being sold without any license from me ("stolen" in the vernacular). SO: What is required is a distributed Authors' Rights Registry database, delivering access terms set by the author(s) of each "object" and licenses they have granted. THEN: Stevan finds one of my articles on UnCover and agrees to pay them $11.05 for a hard copy, of which I get $2.04 net of handling charges; I find one of Stevan's papers on UnCover and agree to pay them $X for a hard copy, Stevan having set the license fee at $0.00. Everyone's needs and wishes are then covered, no? (I strongly suspect that X=11.05 for practical purposes in the near future. Note that when UnCover made a deal with Publication Rights Clearinghouse to handle payments for journalistic work the price of a copy *fell* in Spring 1996 from $11.50 to $11.05. I haven't checked current prices or page charges for long papers.) I am aware of some work in the direction of a distributed database but won't say which, so that any replies will serve partly as an awareness survey. AN ASIDE: Writing this, I pondered *why* I don't use UnCover for refereed papers. I think the answer is that as a journo working to deadlines I usually need a paper *now*, not in the morning. When I want papers I get them from academics' self-archiving websites. Them as doesn't have websites don't get journalistic citations, from me at least. If you hear echoes of Stevan's wider arguments here, you're bang on the mark. -- Mike Holderness http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike