RE: Definition of Open Access

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> If "access" equals "display" (as I suspect he may be thinking), 
> he has a point, albeit a rather casuistic one: He's not copying 
> and distributing--just inviting 300 million of his closest 
> friends to see the display.

I think that would be a good point if uploading an article to an 
IR were the same thing as putting a paper copy of it in a glass 
case in a public place, which is what "display" meant in 1976. 
But it's not 1976, and that's not what happens when you make an 
article freely available to the public on the web.  Displaying a 
physical copy does not, by its nature, result in the creation and 
distribution of multiple copies.  Putting an electronic copy of a 
paper into an IR does just that -- every time someone looks at 
the paper, another copy is created and distributed. 
Self-archiving may not be _commercial_ publication, but I would 
argue that it's publication by any meaningful definition of the 
term.

It's useful to cross-reference the language of article 3.3 of the 
Berne Convention (http://www.law-ref.org/BERN/article3.html 
<http://www.law-ref.org/BERN/article3.html> ) and of article VI 
of the Universal Copyright Convention (1976 version, at 
http://www.ifla.org/documents/infopol/copyright/ucc.txt 
<http://www.ifla.org/documents/infopol/copyright/ucc.txt> ), it 
seems pretty clear that the creation and distribution of 
additional copies is key to the concept of "publication" as 
distinct from "display."

---
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
Univ. of Nevada, Reno Libraries
rickand@unr.edu