First, about the free-rider problem. Sandy Thatcher, who is Director of the Penn State University Press, explains the issue as publishers see it in this reply to the quote from my post in the Chronicle. I want to be clear that I am not necessarily defending the practices at Georgia State; I cannot do so because I only know one side of the argument. One of the advantages a plaintiff gets in a lawsuit is a fairly long period to make their case publicly while the defendant is constrained from replying. But even if “free-riding” applies to the practices at GSU, it is important to note that our law tolerates and even encourages some degree of free-riding on intellectual property as a necessary condition to further creativity. That is the logic behind a long list of exceptions and restraints on the exclusive rights conferred by both copyright and patents, including fair use. My point about free-riding, however, is that it occurs at several places in the system of academic publishing. If GSU free-rides on the publishers, the publishers have likewise taken a unpaid ride on the labor of the University and its faculty when it acquired content from them without payment. Because this free-riding occurs at the very base-point of scholarly publishing, it really cuts off any argument against whatever is happening at GSU based on the incentive system copyright is supposed to create. The incentive for creation that copyright is supposed to offer simply does not exist because publishers absorb all the profits without passing them on to authors.

An exchange in the comments on my own post discusses this point in some depth. Monica McCormick argues that there is still an incentive system for authors, based on two points. One is the small amount of money that is usually paid to academic authors who publish monographs, and the other is the “stability” of the publishing system which advantages authors through promotion and tenure. Regarding the first point, there are some interesting replies from Prof. Kathleen Wallace, whose article “Marketing Ideas” addresses the issues of the scholarly communication system from the perspective of neither librarian nor publisher, but faculty author — the very person about whom we are arguing. So I leave that part of the incentive argument to Prof. Wallace and hope her article will generate some helpful discussion. As for the “stability” of the publishing system, I would note first that this advantage, insofar as it exists, does not seem to be a necessary creation of the copyright system as it is currently put into practice. It is certainly possible to image an equally serviceable system that does not rely on the uncompensated relinquishment of rights. Also, what stability there is in the system — based on effective evaluation and strong reputations — is partially itself the result of uncompensated labor done by faculty members working as reviewers and editors.

Finally, stability in scholarly publishing is currently very much in doubt, largely because of the astronomical prices changed by commercial publishers for academic journals. As more and more of a university’s budget goes for journal content, which often must be purchased repeatedly in different formats, less money is available to serve as incentive in other parts of the system. It is harder and harder to publish a scholarly monograph because sales have dropped so low; a decline that is directly attributable to funds being drawn away from monograph acquisitions by journal prices. McCormick’s point that we should distinguish between large commercial publishers and smaller academic ones, as well as between monograph and journals publishers, is exactly right. The problem is that the actions of the large commercial publishers — and we have to include Oxford and Cambridge Press, who are plaintiffs in the GSU suit, in this category even though the maintain a nominal affiliation with universities — are destabilizing the remainder of the system. It is simply not the case that all would be well of academics would just stop “pirating” their own works from victimized publishers.

Lastly, I want to comment on how all this should play out in the GSU lawsuit. If that case every reaches the stage of arguing the fair use defense, I hope the court will look very hard at the second fair use factor — the nature of the copyrighted work. Previously, the action on this factor has been minimal and has largely focused on published versus unpublished works and how much originality is necessary for “thick” or “thin” protection. But the economics of a particular segment of publishing, especially one as dysfunctional as scholarly publishing, ought to be considered when analyzing fair use, and factor two is a good place to do that. If the system is structured in a way that undermines the whole incentive purpose of copyright, as I have argued the scholarly publishing is, factor two, which really focuses on the expectations of creators of different types of works, should strongly favor an expansive application of fair use. After all, it is, uniquely, the creators themselves who are being sued here and who are asking for a space to make fair use of their own works. The court must determine what that space will look like, but it should be reminded that scholarly publishing simply does not function the way other systems of intellectual property creation do.

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The core of the model agreement is a double license; the author grants to the publisher both a time-limited exclusive right of first publication and a perpetual, non-exclusive license to publish, distribute and sublicense. Subject to these two licenses, copyright is retained by the author. The model agreement contains a number of options or “fill-in-the-blank” points where publishers can customize the license to fit specific conditions. As an attempt to lower the transaction costs associated with publishing, and as an equitable balancing of needs that do not have to be in permanent competition, this is an excellent model to be followed in academic publishing.

It is unfortunate but predictable that one of the most immediate responses from the publishing community was a very revealing demur to the BioOne model agreement project. A university press director posted his objections within two days of the announcement; his position that the agreement is inappropriate even for academic publishers exposes the growing gap between academic publishing and the values of the academy that supports it.

One complaint is that, without an exclusive right in the published works, the publisher will have no standing to sue putative pirates who want to steal academic work. First, we should note that there will still be a rights holder under the model agreement who can enforce the copyright – the author. The problem is that the author’s interests not only do not coincide with the publisher in some cases, they sometimes conflict. The objecting press director notes that the author may actually benefit from wider distribution by a “pirate,” so one wonders why authors should continue to sign away copyrights to organizations who want to wield them as litigation weapons contrary to the authors’ interests. Copyright is supposed to be an author’s right; its genesis as a publisher’s right (associated with their role in censoring unpopular content) is centuries out of date.

And this brings us to the second revealing question about this objection – who are the pirates we are supposed to fear enough to give up copyright entirely to publishers? In fact, the only “pirates” against whom publishers tend to threaten litigation are the authors themselves and their institutions. The “theft” these publishers want to control is faculty authors passing out copies of their work to their own students or to others on campus, to their colleagues at other institutions, and via their websites. No one seriously expects large-scale republication of scholarly content for profit; all that is being defended by these grabs for exclusive copyright transfer is the traditional, and increasingly expensive, subscription model of access. If there is real danger that subscriptions will be canceled because authors retain their own copyrights, and this has never been shown to be the case, all it would illustrate is that this traditional business model has runs its course and no longer serves the interests of those it was created by and for.

The Ithaka report on university publishing asked presses and their parent institutions to reexamine how well publishing is integrated with the interests and values of the academy and the specific university. The BioOne Model Publication Agreement can help advance that integration, and objections to it are a profound illustration of the problem we need to address.

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Beginning immediately, apparently, when an NIH funded researcher has a article about her research accepted for peer-reviewed publication, she is required to deposit a copy of the final version of the article into the open access PubMed Central database within 12 months of publication.

Librarians, and many others in higher education, have lobbied for several years to get this requirement, and others like it for research funded by other taxpayer supported agencies, enacted.  Now the issues of implementation become both real and urgent.  How can we help faculty researchers understand the new mandate?  What publishers can we recommend, and can we help faculty review their publication contracts to be sure compliance (or even earlier public access to the article) is allowed?  Some publishers, like Elsevier, already promise to deposit copies of articles they publish for researchers.  Publishing with such a publisher is an easy way to comply with the mandate, but it will almost certainly result in the full 1 year delay before open access.  For many researchers, there will still be significant advantage in accomplishing open access much sooner than this.  So the task of assisting faculty with understanding their alternatives, negotiating their publication contracts and navigating the mechanics of open access deposit are even more urgent services that academic libraries can and should provide.

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One point on which Suber and the STM publishers agree is that a complete assignment of copyright need not preclude authors from making their work available in open access through a personal webpage, institutional repository or disciplinary archive. Even when faced with a demand to assign the copyright, authors may negotiate to retain the right to deposit their work in the ways suggested, as well as to retain other rights. There seems to be little doubt, and the STM publishers do not even argue the point, that open access deposit is a benefit to scholarly authors. But authors will have to decide for themselves if assigning copyright while retaining that right really serves their best interests or whether they should negotiate to keep their copyrights and give the publisher a more limited permission to publish.

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A consultant for publishing groups recently posted several questions about how the policy relates to authors’ copyrights on a library listserv, intended to convince academic authors that the policy is some kind of threat to them. By responding to those questions below, I hope to clarify the real relation between this new mandate and author’s rights.

The first question was whether supporters of the NIH mandate believe authors should own their copyrights, including the right to charge for their work. In my opinion, an author should have ownership rights in their own work. I also recognize that the unique nature of intellectual property means that those rights have to be subject to limitations and exceptions in the public interest. Every copyright law in the world, and all of the international treaties, recognize and allow for such limitations and exceptions, so this is not a radical proposition. In any case, the NIH policy is not a threat or challenge to copyright ownership. In fact, the explicit language of the provision passed last week requires that the mandate be implemented in a way consistent with an author’s ownership of copyright.

All that the NIH mandate requires is that authors give to the NIH a non-exclusive right to distribute their work no later than one year after it is published. This demand is a much more modest limitation on authorial rights than is the complete transfer of copyright still demanded by many publishers as a precondition of publication. There is no evidence that this delayed and non-exclusive license would harm an author’s ability to charge for her work, although that part of the copyright has little application in the world of academic authorship. On the other hand, there is evidence that public access as soon as possible will benefit an author’s reputation, which is the real value academic authors are able to extract from their copyright ownership.

The second question was whether supporters of NIH deposit believe that authors should have the right to transfer their rights by contract. Again, I support that right very strongly; I spend a good deal of my time advising academic authors about how to accomplish these transfers in a thoughtful manner that benefits them, not just the other party to the transfer. Again, the NIH policy will not impair the ability to do this, it will simply make such contracts subject to the non-exclusive license described above. Governments often put restrictions and requirements on the contents of contracts; it would be absurd to claim that the Uniform Commercial code has seriously impeded a manufacturer’s ability to sell his goods, even though contracts for sale are much more heavily regulated than a publication contract is, even after the NIH mandate.

One must remember that deposit in PubMed Central will not be required until one year after publication, so there is lots of room to negotiate the exact terms by which that non-exclusive license will be implemented. I will certainly advise authors to negotiate for earlier deposit, since it will be to their benefit to do so.

Finally, supporters were challenged about whether they believe academic work is “work for hire” that is owned by their employing universities, and whether they also felt other faculty work,like inventions, should belong to the school. It seems to me that academic work should not be work for hire, although I recognize the strong legal basis on which some universities claim that it is. My preference is for clear policies that leave academic ownership of copyright in the authors’ hands. But again, the NIH policy has nothing to do with work for hire; it certainly does not involve any claim that funding of research makes a work a work made for hire. Such a claim would be insupportable under our current definition of work for hire.

When something is a work for hire, the ownership of the copyrights vests immediately with the employer. In contrast, the NIH is only requiring, again, a non-exclusive license to distribute which will not have to come into being until well more than a year after the copyright vests in the author.

As for other types of intellectual property, I would note that many academics are not uncomfortable with a work for hire claim over patentable inventions because they recognize that university resources are much more involved in such creations and that the assistance of the university is needed to pursue the complex and expensive process of obtaining a patent. Copyright protection is very different in its origination and its terms, so it is quite rightly treated differently.

Responding to these challenges helped me clarify for myself that the real threat to authors’ copyrights is not the NIH public access policy, but an outdated approach to publishing that tries to build an exclusive market around a non-competitive good (which means a good that can be distributed widely without diminishing its supply or value to the creator).

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“Today, too many creators take a passive attitude toward their copyrights. The matter seems complex, and publishers or distributors may tell you that everyone does it their way, or that giving up copyrights is standard practice. But giving up your rights under copyright is a decision, not a default option. If you stand passively by, you may over the course of a long creative career produce a large body of work, most of which is owned and controlled by other people, whose interests and yours may diverge.”

Academic authors and creators should take these words to heart and use this website to develop a proactive strategy for managing the rights they have in the works they create.  The vast array of options now available for sharing and exploiting one’s own creative work suggest that passivity is no longer a sensible option, and the information offered by this site is exactly the remedy needed.

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Pollock bases some of his calculations on the argument that a shorter term becomes more desirable as technology makes reproduction and distribution easier. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the optimal term he arrives at – 14 years – was precisely the term provided by the first English copyright law, the 1709 Statute of Anne.

Even if the copyright term was vastly shorter than it now is, however, many of the arguments for open access to research and scholarship would remain just as strong. That there is great public benefit to wider access to cutting edge research, and great justice in providing taxpayers with no-toll access to the results of research for which they have already paid, are points that do not depend on the length of the copyright term. Even if the term were as short as Pollock proposes, more immediate public access would still be worthwhile pursuit; authors would still need to see that a right to open access deposit was included in their publication agreements and funders, especially government agencies, would still need to mandate such deposit whenever practical. But under our grossly over-extended term of protection, these needs are greatly amplified.

Congress is now considering an appropriations bill that includes funding for the National Institute of Health and, for the first time, would mandate that research funded by the NIH be deposited in the PubMed Central database within six months of publication. This language has clear the appropriations committee and will be considered on the House floor this week. Publishers have objected that this mandate might undermine copyrights, but this argument hardly seems convincing, since most publication agreements already allow authors to offer their own published work on the web. Authors must continue to read such agreements with great attention to be sure they retain this right, and Congress should not let this spurious argument prevent them from seeing the basic justice that demands passage of the NIH appropriations bill as it has come from committee.

Added note — The American Library Association has posted this Action Alert to assist those who would like to encourage Congress to support the NIH mandate.

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Many groups are doing their part to get the word out, emphasizing the need for institutional repositories, retaining author rights and understanding the difference between copy right infringement and fair use. But the work of “Educating the Educators” is never done and I predict that this movement is still in its infancy. It was in this spirit that Kevin Smith, Pat Thibodeau and I led a Scholarly Communications brown bag lunch for the Duke University Library staff this past spring.

Kevin’s presentation, “Authors’ Copyrights: Helping Duke Authors Manage their Rights” was an overview of Duke’s Author Advisory Service that provides information and advice for Duke faculty authors. Kevin’s presentation emphasized that informed authors can “add value by increasing the usability of their work.”

Pat’s presentation, “Faculty / Author Advocacy: Power and Influence on Scholarly Publishing” outlined methods of encouraging faculty to become Scholarly Communication Advocates and to consider publishing in Open Science (Access) sources. This advocacy is mutually beneficial for faculty members and libraries. Faculty can increase the “visibility of their work” and “immediately communicate with peers” and libraries will be in a stronger position to provide access to affordable content.

My presentation, “Institutional Repositories + Libraries” presented the findings of an Association of Research Libraries’ study of the growth and use of Institutional Repositories (IR’s) in libraries. I also gave an overview of the four IR’s at Duke University:

1. Portfolio @ Duke
2. MeDSpace
3. Duke Law Faculty Scholarship Repository
4. DukeSpace (Under Development)

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Should Boccaccio have been able to sue Chaucer to establish that only ideas and not expression were appropriated when Chaucer wrote his “derivative works?”  Without literary borrowing, the great works of world literature would not have been possible; Chaucer could not have written The Canterbury Tales and Mark Helprin could not have written… whatever Mark Helprin has written.  Then there is the culture of remix and parody fostered by the Internet — a whole new kind of creativity that should not be stifled in its infancy.  So perhaps the most appropriate response to Helprin is to read another recent article that celebrates the interplay and interpenetration of cultural creation, The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem, which appeared in Harpers in February 2007.

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