Subject: Re: Library Link discussion (fwd)
T. Scott Plutchak (TSCOTT@LISTER2.LHL.UAB.EDU)
Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 18:12:12 -0600
Message-Id: <701FFCC0F2D3D111A09B006097D552148B9E98@lister2.lhl.uab.edu> From: "T. Scott Plutchak" <TSCOTT@LISTER2.LHL.UAB.EDU> To: arl-ejournal@arl.org Subject: Re: Library Link discussion (fwd) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 18:12:12 -0600
On Fri, Feb 05, 1999, Jean-Claude Guedon <guedon@ere.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Carol Goodson <cgoodson@westga.edu> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Tony Barry <tonyb@dynamite.com.au> wrote:
> > >
> > > Even better - do NOT submit you papers to ...
> > > _any_ journal that restricts your right to republish your own writing.
> >
> > I believe that if you continue to hold all rights to your work, it
> > limits the journal publisher from making deals with commercial indexers
> > to include the journal content in published indexes and/or full-text
> > databases... although I'm as eager to profit as the next person, I
> > think I ultimately prefer what I write to be retrievable by others,
> > and thus possibly useful.
>
> Two answers to Ms Goodson's objections:
>
> 1. Why would there be problems to indexing articles whose rights are held
> by the author and not the publisher? Indexing is not copying and I can
> hardly imagine an author refusing to be indexed. And I am not even sure
> he could legally refuse if there is nothing malevolent in the act. At the
> same time, I do not see present copyright laws having anything to do with
> indexing. Librarians, so far as I know, never asked anyone if they wanted
> to catalog books and articles; the Colorado consortium never asked
> journals whether they had the right to index their tables of contents;
> they dealt with journal only when they decided to offer a fax or
> electronic delivery of articles.
>
> 2. If commercial indexers do not want to do it, libraries could do it. It
> could become a new cataloguing task of libraries and if they divide the
> task intelligently among themselves, the work could be fairly light and
> routine. Another good example of the implementation of a distributed
> intelligence society.
Copyright does not affect the indexing of articles. Abstracts (often
included in online bibliographic databases) are another matter. If
authors reserve the copyrights to their abstracts, then bibliographic
database producers will need to deal individually with those authors to
get rights to reproduce the abstracts. Similarly, if the author retains
all rights but first serial publication, it will complicate the
licensing of full-text.
Having said that, however, these are solveable issues. Copyrights are
segmented all the time in the trade & entertainment industry where one
pays considerable attention to exactly what rights one is selling
(publication in hardback in US, for example, while reserving rights to
publication in other countries, paperback publication, serialization,
dramatization based on, etc., etc., etc...) In the scholarly publishing
world, however, we have tended to look at it as all or nothing -- which
is only to the benefit of the commercial publishers. Scholars need to
become much more savvy about what the value of their copyrights really
is and then work through their institutions and their professional
societies to parcel those rights out in ways that enhance the
distribution of scholarly information. Your right, as a
scholar/scientist, to your intellectual property, is one of the most
important and powerful tools you have. We need to learn how to use
these tools wisely, to the benefit of the scholarly enterprise.
T. Scott Plutchak
Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
Associate Director, Academic Programs Information Technology
University of Alabama at Birmingham
tscott@uab.edu
http://www.uab.edu/lister/
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