Re: Public Access to Science Act (Sabo Bill, H.R. 2613)

From: Sally Morris <sec-gen_at_alpsp.org>
Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2003 14:17:17 +0100

Stevan Harnad wrote:

"Most of the existing 24,000 journals would not
accept to publish public-domain texts"

I think this is probably inaccurate. I would guess that practically all of
those journals do publish works which are currently governed by the Public
Domain status of US Government works.

To my mind, the question really is whether either the authors or their
employer actually do anything to avail themselves of the works' Public
Domain status. No one seems to have been able to answer this question.

If they don't, why should the Sabo Bill's extension of identical status to
Federally funded works, in itself, be expected to achieve anything for the
Open Access agenda?

Sally

Sally Morris, Secretary-General
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK

Phone: 01903 871686 Fax: 01903 871457 E-mail: sec-gen_at_alpsp.org
ALPSP Website http://www.alpsp.org


----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: <AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG>
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 3:07 PM
Subject: Re: Public Access to Science Act (Sabo Bill, H.R. 2613)


> [identity deleted] wrote:
>
> > I read your interesting reply to Joseph Pietro Riolo on the
> > digital-copyright list.
> >
> > I am thinking of writing a reply to this discussion too. I
> > think many people believe this is only a question of remuneration and
> > ego. In what we call the information age - or even the knowledge
> > society - I believe it is a very very important question to be able
> > to keep track of who did say what to whom about what. Otherwise
> > intellectual discussion would almost return to oral tradition with
> > the kind of distortion that comes with it.
>
> [I hope your further comments will be public, to undo the irony of the
> fact that without permission I could only reply to them here
> anonymously!]
>
> There are probably clever digital ways of tracking who posted what
> publicly. The public-domain problem is not just that. It's partly
> about "intellectual property" (for which Europe has rights-protection,
> independent of copyright, whereas the US does not) and partly about not
> needlessly constraining authors' right to submit their work to whatever
> journal they choose: Most of the existing 24,000 journals would not
> accept to publish public-domain texts. If that had been the only way
> to attain open access, it might have been necessary to consider it
> anyway, but since open-access self-archiving is completely compatible
> with copyright and copyright transfer (or licensing) to the journal
> publisher, there is no need whatsoever to force the public-domain
> constraint onto either authors or publishers. Trying to do so would
> only needlessly delay open access still further. The Public Access to
> Science Act (Sabo Bill) needs to be modified to mandate open-access only,
> not public-domain.
>
> [By the way, I think that in a sense we *are* going back to the oral
> tradition -- but with its "verba volunt, scripta manent" handicap
> remedied by the public and permanent nature of PostGutenberg "skywriting"
> http://www.interdisciplines.org/defispublicationweb/papers/6 ]
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
> NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
> access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
> the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03):
>
> http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
> or
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
>
> Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
Received on Fri Sep 05 2003 - 14:17:17 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Dec 10 2010 - 19:47:03 GMT