RE: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...

["Velterop, Jan, Springer UK" <Jan.Velterop@springer.com>]

Peter Hirtle is right. Since a long time I have held the view 
that -- at least in the realm of peer-reviewed research 
publication -- copyright, particularly its transfer from author 
to publisher, is essentially used as a proxy for money. Often 
combined with real money in the form of e.g. page charges. 
Together, the transfer of copyright and real money charges are 
the price an author pays for the service of having his research 
formally published in a peer-review journal, which he needs, 
inter alia, for career and prospective funding purposes.

One could see the use of copyright as a proxy for money as 
inappropriate, but certainly in the print era it was a pragmatic 
and workable way of supporting the system of peer-reviewed formal 
research journals. Copyright, the property of the publisher after 
transfer, was converted into real money by exploiting the 
exclusive right to sell (access to) the material.

In the web world, the situation is different. First of all, 
authors can quite easily disseminate their articles themselves on 
the web. That doesn't make them formally published in a 
peer-reviewed journal, but it does the job of spreading the 
knowledge. This is what preprints do, or at least can do 
(terribly antiquated word, 'preprints', but let's ignore that for 
now).

Remains the issue of formal, official, publishing in a 
peer-reviewed journal. On the 'other planet' authors seem to 
expect publishers of journals to formally publish their articles 
in peer-reviewed journals (the reputations of which often took a 
long time to build up) for free, and to regard it as a right 
subsequently to be able just to add the label "formally published 
in journal XYZ" to their preprints in order to give those the 
needed authority and trustworthiness. The "Hop on the bus, Gus, 
the other suckers have paid for us" school of thought.

Open access is fundamentally incompatible with the use of 
copyright as a proxy for money to pay for formal peer-reviewed 
publication. I favour the transition to paying with plain money, 
and open access will be the entirely natural outcome of that. 
Technical and procedural problems exist, to be sure. But if the 
choice is between trying to solve those or to evade or even deny 
them, my vote goes to solving them.

Jan Velterop