On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Charles W. Bailey, Jr. wrote:
> Thanks for your reply.
>
> Let's assume that Psycoloquy was fully open access.
>
> Would you (or your contributors) care if a commercial publisher
> took Psycoloquy, reformatted it, indexed it, published it in print
> form, sold it, and kept all profits?
>
> Would you care if they also offered an electronic version for a
> fee that had system capabilities not found in the original, such
> as reference links to articles in commercial journals?
>
> Best Regards,
> Charles
>
> Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Assistant Dean for Systems,
> University of Houston, Library Administration,
> 114 University Libraries, Houston, TX 77204-2000.
> E-mail: cbailey_at_uh.edu. Voice: (713) 743-9804.
> Fax: (713) 743-9811. http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/bailey.htm
Dear Charles,
First, Psycoloquy
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy/ is
indeed fully open access.
Second, I am really not sure what answer to give to your question.
Perhaps I have not thought the possibilities through sufficiently.
But here is my first approximation to an answer (thinking as
an author/contributor):
(1) The material in full-text, open-access journals (e.g.
Psycoloquy) consists of peer-reviewed research.
(2) The authors of this peer-reviewed research do not seek
fees or royalties for their work. They seek only research
impact (i.e., that it should be visible, read, cited, used).
(3) If a commercial secondary publisher (or anyone else) decides to
"use" the texts by repackaging and enhancing them, and offering them
for sale, it seems to me that this is a victimless act. (It is a crime
only if the authorship and original source are not clearly indicated,
or the text is altered or corrupted in some way -- but those are other
matters: you asked about simply re-using it for sale.)
(4) At worst, commercial re-packaging and sale can simply fail to sell,
because users will prefer to use the free version; at best, it can add
a bit more impact to the research.
(5) Most of the world's 20,000 refereed journals are not online-only
at the moment, with their full-texts accessible online from the
publisher toll-free: The paper version, as well as the publisher's
online version must be paid for by users. This too is no problem
for the author/institution self-archiving of the refereed final drafts
of those same papers. The two versions -- for-free and [possibly
enhanced] for-fee -- can peacefully co-exist as long as there is a
market for the for-fee version.
In summary, I think (unless your concerns are indeed about
text-corruption or plagiarism, which is another matter), that you might
be mixing conventional concerns about royalty-seeking literature (such
as books) with the special case of this give-away corpus (peer-reviewed
research), whose authors do not seek royalties, but merely seek to
maximize visibility, access, useage and impact.
Best wishes,
Stevan
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad harnad_at_cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science harnad_at_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.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
Received on Sat Jan 26 2002 - 11:32:00 GMT