That is the sort of situation that would benefit from a central, searchable repository. It would probably be so cheap to run and so comparatively easy that some university / institution somewhere would be able to run it as a public benefit project.
Of course if copyright has been assigned to a journal, the person that’s passed on wouldn’t have any rights to assign to sites like that.
And purely technically, even their heirs would be potentially breaking the law by distributing their papers in that sort of case.
I’d say they would for sure break the law, if the rights are given to another entity.
Even the author, if all the rights are passed to another entity (e.g. the publisher), might not be able to distribute his papers at will.
The author might only have the right on the paternity of the paper, which he cannot waive (in an European common law system, but the cores of IP law should be almost the same everywhere).
Interesting thread, anyway, a pleasure to read it =)
Right. I’m operating on the (unstated) underlying assumption that regardless of the legality, a journal probably wouldn’t sue the author of a paper for handing out the occasional copy, because that would look really, really bad.
But if the original author is dead, it would be a different situation.
In at least some cases the author has the right to distribute a certain number of copies. If those haven’t been “used up” by the author during their lifetime then perhaps it would be possible to continue it.
Or here’s another thought, could there be a limited time of paid for access and then free access? Long enough that most of the folks who need the papers will still have to go through the official processes but so that eventually it DOES all end up in the public domain?
Trying to think outside the current restrictions myself.
Or, here’s another thought, a single university gets subscriptions to pretty much every journal in the world. Then they develop a single class that online students can take each semester that is ONLY for access to their library. It would not be part of any specific degree and would be freely available to anybody with the cash. Students don’t have to be accepted into a degree program and you can take the class over and over as you need or want to. My personal budget would be something like $200-250/semester to get unfettered access to reference papers. In effect monetize the community access that most libraries allow if you show up in person but don’t make it out of reach for independent researchers to cover.
That would be good for one-offs. It would be ideal if there were some way to have the papers and such effectively revert into the public domain before copyright expired, though. Copyrights assigned to companies last something like 125 years.
If these contracts were better-worded, that could all be built into the contract - but I’m not sure how many people care when they’re assigning the rights.
I believe the journals charge fees based on the size of the university - so that would massively ramp up costs. And if they don’t, if a university did that I’m betting they would in short order.
yeah that’s for sure, and it’s my opinion too, it would make no financial sense to pursue a single (or many, for what that matter) “human operated leaks” =)
This idea cannot be marketed exactly in the way you propose. The purpose of the course cannot be solely or even perhaps explicitly to provide access to library holdings. I believe this would eventually run afoul of publishers (if they cared to look hard enough) and perhaps even university accreditation panels (a course that gives out A grades simply because you sign up and download 35 journal articles … what the heck???). In addition, I can see this generating undue overhead among faculty and administration with the internal politics to manage where the tuition from the course should go.
The better option is to have a course called the equivalent of “Bibliography and Citation Management” or “Researching Scientific/Engineering/Historical/Medical/… Literature”. It could be managed by the faculty/staff at the library.
This is an interesting proposal at a graduate level more so than undergraduate level. Credit hours at undergraduate levels are being cut while graduate students oft might meander around wondering what other courses they can/should take to complete their program of study. And, from personal experience, I certainly would appreciate having a course where I could channel my graduate students to have them learn how to focus themselves with literature searches or bibliography management.
So… Here is an interesting sideline. Perusing old scientific papers, even those far “out of date” could prove vital for current problems. So my penchant for seeking out old scientific info may actually have value.
I will raise this discussion with a colleague at our library.
Off the top of my head, probably not. The trend is to have Olli related courses for this. And again the opening to do this course at an undergraduate level would depend on the sentiments of the university faculty itself.
The option most likely to be available would be to register as an undeclared major and take a course of some kind. But ask before you do about whether you have limitations to online library access and interlibrary loan in such a case. And, ask whether the library even has access to the journals that you want. I would hope that the library staff at the university should be more than willing to help you in an open and honest manner.
How about offering a limited and unpaid internship to a young aspiring pre-vet or animal husbandry/science student and have them run the bibliography/literature search as part of their duties? It would give them valuable real world experience, you would get your papers.
