Re: Fair use / fair dealing - a fantasy?

["atanu garai" <atanugarai.lists@gmail.com>]

   Heather Morrison wrote:

> Sandy Thatcher wrote:  Most journal contracts I am familiar 
> with specify the transfer of "all rights." Such a transfer 
> means what it says, quite literally, and it is entirely 
> unnecessary therefore to include any specific
> waiver of fair use rights. The very act of transferring all
> rights effectively accomplishes that, and nothing more needs to 
> be added.

This debate is becoming too hypothetical, without corroboration 
from practical instances from the journals. The concept of 'fair 
use', especially in the context of journal publishing is very 
apparent and straightforward, virtually across all the copyright 
acts in most of the countries. American Society for Biochemistry 
and Molecular Biology published a good number of respected and 
highly-cited journals in this domain. The Society states that:

Quote:

ASBMB does not charge for and grants use without requiring your 
copyright permission request for:

   * The Journal of Biological Chemistry is copyrighted by the 
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc. 
ASBMB grants use without requiring your copyright permission 
request for: Original authors wanting to reproduce figures or 
tables from their own work to publish in not-for-profit formats 
or venues, provided that full acknowledgment of the source is 
provided in the new work.
   * Students wanting to reproduce or republish their work for 
educational purposes.
   * Students using other authors' material for their theses.
   * Reproduction or republication of abstracts only.
   * Photocopying up to 5 copies for personal use.
   * Non-profit educational institutions making multiple 
photocopies of articles for classroom use; all such reproduction 
must utilize institutionally owned equipment for this purpose.
Unquote
(http://www.jbc.org/misc/Copyright_Permission.shtml)

So, the scope for 'fair use' by author or a reader is quite 
understandable from the publishers' point of view. Presumably, 
authors did not have major objection to this policy and practice 
taken by the publishers until now. It is difficult to tell with 
the availability of OA options, authors would want or demand a 
larger scope of 'fair access' that allows them to exercise 'fair 
use'. In my personal experience, authors will not be indulged in 
activities like pressing 'fair use button' for the practical 
reason of their lack of time. Often the OA advocates have dealt 
with the broader goals of broadening the horizons of access 
through developing various technologies, but without much 
realisation of the practical aspects or implications of such 
technology uses. In last few years, I have made many requests 
over email to individual authors to send their published articles 
for my own academic works. If the work is already available on 
the web, they would almost immediately send the link (and perhaps 
the article itself as an attachment) but if such articles are 
available through commercial publishers, they would tell to 
contact the commercial publisher concerned.

We can also debate the hypothesis that since authors intend to 
increase access to their research through open access, hence they 
will engage themselves in self-archiving, using fair use button 
and so on. They will not. Author's motivation for spreading their 
research output does not necessarily translate into their 
engagement in open access. In thousands years of publishing 
history, authors have never dealt with the issue of access. They 
have confined themselves in doing research, writing the research 
and transfer the note to other people. The greatest impetus for 
author's motivation for spreading their research need not come 
from the availability of open access, but from improving their 
scholarly output so that the research papers become qualified for 
publication in quality journals.

-- 
Atanu Garai
Online Networking Specialist
Globethics.net

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