Comments on: Open Access Law: Launched

By: Edward Banana

Edward Banana — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:40:10 +0000

I have yet to get an answer to this question.

If a group of people were to be blackmailed by the same organization, could an invasion of privacy lawsuit be done in a class action form to help hide the identities of those ivolved, and increase the moral of the victims garnishing more support against the extortionists?

By: Joseph Savirimuthu

Joseph Savirimuthu — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 05:44:02 +0000

Larry - fantastic
Over the next few weeks I hope to get together volunteers to set up a Visually Impaired Persons Commons. My disabled friends are unable to get access to e-copies of copyrighted works in advance (even though they are prepared to pay for these - the myth of disabled pirates runs deep even in the UK). Some publishers are keen to give disabled students access - but the coporate heirarchy (and inertia), has meant that there is a lot of talk with little action.

My wife is herself blind - and I know first hand the frustrations of a VIP having to wait for months before an article is scanned, processed and sent to her. The students are in no better position.

We would have loved to have you chair a session on June 9th at the British Library - not least, that it would have raised media and institutional awarenesss of the critical need to do something about this now. As I commented in the session on 8th, the Publishing industry would not have been so backword about coming forward, if there was a Napsterisation of the publishing industry.

We will soldier on regardless -- I am going to use the Learning & Teaching Conference in Liverpool University on the 29th June to make CC for the VIP a priority. All support and advice will be appreciated.

By: Dan Hunter

Dan Hunter — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 15:03:44 +0000

Following up on Bill Burgess's comment, it's true that Wexis doesn't require exclusivity in their contracts with law reviews. Which is not to say that they don't see a benefit in informal mechanisms that push towards exclusivity. If they lose even one download to open access archives then, to their way of thinking, OA is a bad thing. This seems to be what happened with me and California Law Review, where Cal L Rev thought it was a good idea to reduce open access to the work they published, and demanded that I take down open access versions of my articles. Their stated reason was their (alleged) loss of revenue from Wexis.

I think time will show that there is no significant substitution effect between Wexis downloads and OA downloads. The significant formal response at the moment is to note that there is no contractual exclusivity requirement in the Wexis agreements.

By: Bill Burgess

Bill Burgess — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 13:40:19 +0000

I'm a bit curious about your assertion that "Lexis and Westlaw don't require exclusivity. Any resistance is therefore primarily inertia."

This is my impression too, but after reading Dan Hunter's "Walled Gardens" paper, I think he disagrees. If I remember correctly, he says that, while WL and LEXIS don't REQUIRE exclusivity, they pressure journals to require restrictive copyright agreements of their authors.

To my knowledge, my journal is under no pressure from Lexis or WL to restrict the rights of our authors.

By: Frank Bennett

Frank Bennett — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 20:22:06 +0000

Is there an address or separate link for the discussion mentioned in the post? I'm a member of a research group working to improve the efficiency of another area of legal publishing (the translation of statutes and regulations), and I'd very much like to join.

By: Sanjoy Mahajan

Sanjoy Mahajan — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 18:56:32 +0000

The OAL Model Publishing Agreement will be useful for other fields. Another reasonable model is the SPARC author addendum.

In the OAL Author Pledge, Principle 3 says the journals will offer "an author at least the freedoms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license". That phrasing omits the main point of open-access licensing: that the public gets the freedoms. The author getting them is just a means to that end -- a reasonable one, since most academic authors rightly prefer fame over fortune and are therefore more public spirited than publishers are.