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Facilitating open access: Developing support for author control of copyright

2006; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 67; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/crln.67.4.7602

2150-6698

John Ober,

Library Science and Information Systems

W hen I was first contemplating this column, and a similar set of comments I made at the ACRL/SPARC Forum at the 2006 ALA Mid winter Meeting in San Antonio, I was tempted to use an extended Lord of the Rings metaphor.In this metaphor, copyright is the Tolkien trilogy's ring-of inestimable value and bestowing great power on its possessor.Lawerence Lessig, of the Creative Commons, is Frodo, with the hopes of many riding on his efforts as he carries the ring to a place where it will be, well, not destroyed, but transformed.Take your pick of any num ber of avaricious publishers to be Gollum, the conflicted character whose spirit has become wellblackened, wily, severe, and tailored to do nothing but covet the precious ring.Conveniently, for our metaphor, Gollum has two warring selves, the one driven by pure greed, and the one who wants to do right by the fellowship made up of faculty (hob bits and "men"), scholarly societies (elves), nonprofit publishers (dwarves), and librarians (wizards), i.e., the ones who want a healthy scholarly communication environment for its own sake.But there is that pesky profi tmoti vated Gollum, too.And the fellowship simply wants the power, including the economic power that comes with the copyright ring, to be balanced in a way that allows knowledge to progress and be made available to future knowledge producers in a "sustainable" way.The fellowship wants a balance so that the pastoral shire of teaching, learning, research, and societal progress fl ourishes, unburdened by constraints on how research is noncom mercially shared and used, or by crippling prices that deny access to the research results for many in the fi rst place.But, in addition to my limitations as a deconstructionist of mid20thcentury fi ction, and despite the possible entertainment value, no metaphor can be extended far enough to fairly characterize the motivations and contri butions of various stakeholders, or to do justice to the complexity of even the small corner of copyright that relates to scholarly publishing.