---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 15:33:00 +0100
From: Mike Holderness <mch@cix.compulink.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Authors "Victorious" in UnCover Copyright Suit

In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.3.95.1000810085625.17089C-100000@cogito.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Stevan Harnad <harnad@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk> writes,
concerning the UnCover ruling:

> Insofar as books are concerned, nolo contendere.
>
> But insofar as refereed journal articles are concerned, this lawsuit
> and its "victorious" outcome for researchers represents nothing but
> short-sighted nonsense.
>
> Journal articles are author GIVE-AWAYS; the average refereed journal
> article (this is a free estimate, but unlikely to be far from the
> truth) has, let's say, 25 readers, and zero citations (apart from
> self-citations), in its entire life-cycle. (Authors for whom UnCover
> raises that number by 1 or 2 are not "abused"!)

Once more, with feeling:

How you perceive this ruling clearly depends on what place you occupy
in the writing economy/ies, and how you use UnCover.

Stevan indeed writes papers as give-aways, having a salary which is
in part influenced by citation.
        I infer from what he writes above that he uses UnCover (&co)
largely to locate papers by others occupying the same niche.

I write articles to make a living, as a freelance.
        I use UnCover (&co) largely to locate articles written by
journalists. From time to time I discover my own work being sold
without any license from me ("stolen" in the vernacular).

SO:

What is required is a distributed Authors' Rights Registry database,
delivering access terms set by the author(s) of each "object" and
licenses they have granted.

THEN:

Stevan finds one of my articles on UnCover and agrees to pay
them $11.05 for a hard copy, of which I get $2.04 net of
handling charges;

I find one of Stevan's papers on UnCover and agree to pay
them $X for a hard copy, Stevan having set the license fee
at $0.00.

Everyone's needs and wishes are then covered, no?

(I strongly suspect that X=11.05 for practical purposes in the
near future. Note that when UnCover made a deal with Publication
Rights Clearinghouse to handle payments for journalistic work
the price of a copy *fell* in Spring 1996 from $11.50 to $11.05.
I haven't checked current prices or page charges for long papers.)

I am aware of some work in the direction of a distributed database
but won't say which, so that any replies will serve partly as an
awareness survey.

AN ASIDE:

Writing this, I pondered *why* I don't use UnCover for refereed
papers. I think the answer is that as a journo working to
deadlines I usually need a paper *now*, not in the morning.

When I want papers I get them from academics' self-archiving
websites. Them as doesn't have websites don't get journalistic
citations, from me at least. If you hear echoes of Stevan's wider
arguments here, you're bang on the mark.

--
Mike Holderness
http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike