18.523 author's rights

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 523.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

   [1] From: Adrian Miles <adrian.miles_at_rmit.edu.au> (28)
         Subject: Re: 18.511 author's rights

   [2] From: "Campbell, Duncan" (72)
                 <Duncan.Campbell_at_proquest.co.uk>
         Subject: RE: 18.517 author's rights

   [3] From: Kevin Hawkins <kshawkin_at_umich.edu> (2)
         Subject: Re: author's rights

   [4] From: Lynda Williams <lynda_at_okalrel.org> (71)
         Subject: Re: 18.517 author's rights

   [5] From: Pat Galloway <galloway_at_ischool.utexas.edu> (19)
         Subject: Re: 18.517 author's rights

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 08:22:45 +0000
         From: Adrian Miles <adrian.miles_at_rmit.edu.au>
         Subject: Re: 18.511 author's rights

around the 21/1/05 Stewart Arneil mentioned about 18.511 author's rights that:

>As for the "am I naive": I'm assuming from your email address that you are
>an employee. The vast majority of salaried people producing material
>(including scientists) have virtually no rights over, let alone own, what
>they produce -- their employers or contractees do. Academics in academic
>institutions are the exception. The new technologies of distribution have
>also caused academic institutions to reconsider terms for intellectual
>property rights. I think it is to some degree naive to assume that you can
>accept pay from somebody for work and then you have complete control over
>that work and they have none. Your contract with your employer presumably
>spells out terms. Those terms may constrain what you are able to agree to
>with a publisher.

thanks for all the helpful comments, which pretty much indicated to me what
I expected and will do.

Regarding the above. In my university there is a general understanding that
individuals own the rights to things like published essays, books and the
like. the university is only serious about IP if we are talking patents,
etc. This is not an informal arrangement but the case. Also some Northern
European universities that I am familiar with also regard staff as owning
IP of their work.

In my institution's case we also assume and grant full IP to students of
all their work, this is also the case in the other universities with which
I have some experience.

--
cheers
Adrian Miles
____________
hypertext.RMIT
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 08:23:29 +0000
         From: "Campbell, Duncan" <Duncan.Campbell_at_proquest.co.uk>
         Subject: RE: 18.517 author's rights
The issue here is not necessarily to do with the question of print on
demand as a publishing technology, rather, that authors should be
careful before signing a contract for a print volume that includes
electronic or print on demand rights. If you sign such a contract, a
publishing house can in effect retain all rights to your work, even if
you have a standard rights reversion clause, because with print on
demand, a book can be considered to be permanently in print. This means
that a publishing house can refuse to revert rights even if the author
requests it (which you may well want to do, if a publisher appears to
have lost interest in the title, they won't publish a revised edition,
and so on). I would assume that current best practice insists on a more
carefully worded reversion clause than has hitherto been the case?
Unless a book is originated electronically, POD can be a relatively
expensive option, and in these cases, most publishers -- quite rightly,
I think -- will only move a book to POD when there is no more continuing
demand for the title, but it will still sell a few copies here and
there. It is of course in a publisher's best interests to keep a print
version out there as long as possible, as margins on "conventially
printed" books are relatively higher, especially for hardbacks. In the
case of titles originated electronically, given that for hardback print
runs "as few as 350 is not uncommon" (and, to be honest, sales of under
200 are not uncommon, either), the economics of digital printing can
make much more sense for academic and specialist imprints.
Duncan Campbell
-----Original Message-----
From: Humanist Discussion Group [mailto:humanist_at_Princeton.EDU] On
Behalf Of Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty
<willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>)
Sent: 23 January 2005 09:52
To: humanist_at_Princeton.EDU
                 Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 517.
         Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                     www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                          www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                       Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu
           Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 09:43:51 +0000
           From: "Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett" <bkg_at_nyu.edu>
           Subject: RE: 18.516 author's rights
    >>> why are authors also being advised to reject print-on-demand
methods for their work?
I ask because I am embarking on this very option right now, for a
collection of peer-reviewed conference proceedings.  We intend to
publish the proceedings at the Stoa site so that readers may freely read
online and/or print out each of the contributions, but we will also
gather them all together and offer them as a very reasonably-priced book
using the on-demand model via lulu.com.  That way authors can correctly
assert that their scholarship has been peer-reviewed, they can say they
have contributed a chapter to a book, they retain 100% of their rights,
and readers have a full range of choices, from desultory browsing to
having a tangible book in their hands on their shelf, if they so desire.
I don't see the downside to this approach, and it seems to resolve many
problems.
Ross Scaife
    >From Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett:
I do not know their reasoning, but would surmise that they want to
protect an author's efforts to publish in book form, publish in
paperback, and keep books in print. This is becoming much more of an
issue as publishers of academic books opt to print fewer copies (as few
as 350 is not uncommon), hardcover only, and at a high price. This
limits the printed book to library sales. It may therefore be preferable
to protect the print edition and for the publisher to invest more in its
success, which would be undermined by a print-on-demand option, at least
during the first few years of a book's life. An electronic edition is
another animal.
In the case you describe the print-on-demand option seems like a good
idea, given the specialized nature of the publication and how you
envision it being accessed.
Although the Authors Guild is thinking more of the trade market than
academic books, academics need to take heed.
Does anyone have any experience with a publication that appears in one
or more of these forms--physical book, electronic book, print-on-demand
book? What are the economic and other implications for authors?
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 08:23:52 +0000
         From: Kevin Hawkins <kshawkin_at_umich.edu>
         Subject: Re: author's rights
Those interested in negotiating rights for journal articles might also look at:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/resources/copyres.html
Kevin Hawkins
--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 08:24:14 +0000
         From: Lynda Williams <lynda_at_okalrel.org>
         Subject: Re: 18.517 author's rights
Dear Humanists Group...
I believe we are living through a period of culture clash over the whole
digital vs. print vs. print on demand method of publishing. You won't
find any one, universally acceptable answer. My rule of thumb for those
who ask is to reply with a question: "What do you want to achieve most?
Be read and accessible to those who want to access your work? Or publish
via a venue that you know to frown on POD or online alternatives?"
Without personal goals and targetted publishers clearly in sight, there
is simply no way to answer the question of what is or is not right to do
anymore.  You might be interested in some of the papers recently done in
connection with these questions by the LitCan project, managed by
principle researcher Dr. Dee Horne. (This was in the realm of Literary
Publishing but many of the ideas apply across the specturem.)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Lynda Williams, M.Sc. Computation, M.L.S. info sci
http://www.okalrel.org lynda@okalrel.org (fiction)
http://ctl.unbc.ca (University of Northern B.C.)
Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty
<willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>) wrote:
 >               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 517.
 >       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
 >                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
 >                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
 >                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu
 >
 >         Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 09:43:51 +0000
 >         From: "Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett" <bkg_at_nyu.edu>
 >         >
 >
 >  >>> why are authors also being advised to reject print-on-demand methods
 >for their work?
 >
 >I ask because I am embarking on this very option right now, for a
 >collection of peer-reviewed conference proceedings.  We intend to
 >publish the proceedings at the Stoa site so that readers may freely
 >read online and/or print out each of the contributions, but we will
 >also gather them all together and offer them as a very
 >reasonably-priced book using the on-demand model via lulu.com.  That
 >way authors can correctly assert that their scholarship has been
 >peer-reviewed, they can say they have contributed a chapter to a book,
 >they retain 100% of their rights, and readers have a full range of
 >choices, from desultory browsing to having a tangible book in their
 >hands on their shelf, if they so desire.  I don't see the downside to
 >this approach, and it seems to resolve many problems.
 >
 >Ross Scaife
 >
 >  >From Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett:
 >
 >I do not know their reasoning, but would surmise that they want to
 >protect an author's efforts to publish in book form, publish in
 >paperback, and keep books in print. This is becoming much more of an
 >issue as publishers of academic books opt to print fewer copies (as few
 >as 350 is not uncommon), hardcover only, and at a high price. This
 >limits the printed book to library sales. It may therefore be preferable
 >to protect the print edition and for the publisher to invest more in its
 >success, which would be undermined by a print-on-demand option, at least
 >during the first few years of a book's life. An electronic edition is
 >another animal.
 >
 >In the case you describe the print-on-demand option seems like a good
 >idea, given the specialized nature of the publication and how you
 >envision it being accessed.
 >
 >Although the Authors Guild is thinking more of the trade market than
 >academic books, academics need to take heed.
 >
 >Does anyone have any experience with a publication that appears in one
 >or more of these forms--physical book, electronic book, print-on-demand
 >book? What are the economic and other implications for authors?
 >
 >Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
--[5]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 08:24:39 +0000
         From: Pat Galloway <galloway_at_ischool.utexas.edu>
         Subject: Re: 18.517 author's rights
I heard a presentation by Niko Pfund of Oxford University Press, who said
that their print-on-demand program had been very successful (here's a
Chronicle article from a couple of uears ago when it was getting started:
http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i29/29b00701.htm), and the effect is just
that the author continues to get a trickle of royalties instead of having
the book go totally out of print; I guess where it might be a problem is if
the contract required a press to keep a book in print for some period of
time or to return copyright to the author if and when the book went out of
print--presumably you could insist contractually that p-o-d doesn't meet
that requirement. For examples like that cited, small-demand meeting
proceedings, the method would seem ideal as long as the authors are in
charge--in the paper world already, short-run presses emerged to do just
that sort of thing, but were obviously less efficient. What we don't know,
really, is what better efficiency in the market will mean: as penniless
academics we have all benefited by remaindering, which has even led in some
cases to the revival and recognition of an overlooked work years after
publication (and claims for p-o-d are that it will have the same effect).
Taking the float out of such "systems" always has unintended consequences,
not always good even if authors are able to retain control.
Pat Galloway