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From: adler@pulsar.wku.edu (Allen Adler)
Subject: Re: Publishing Scholarly Work on the Web -- opinions?
Organization: Western Kentucky University
Date: 16 Sep 1996 09:28:49 -0500
Message-ID: <2gg24i8rfi.fsf@pulsar.cs.wku.edu>


Alden S. Klovdahl writes:

>   3.  there is nothing that precludes publishing in both electronic and 
>       traditional media.

There is one thing that precludes it: publishers routinely require
that an author sign away all of his/her rights to his/her work.
The publisher has all the rights and the author is no longer
free to reproduce his own work.

I am at this moment agonizing over this very point. I have a book
that is about to appear in Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics
and I will have to sign away my rights to it in the manner I have
just described. Moreover, Springer does not normally remunerate
authors in this series. Instead, it gives them a certain number
of free copies of their own book. The agreement does give the author
the right to reproduce parts of the book for future works, but only if
the book is published by Springer, which in effect gives them and
not the author the right to decide whether a subsequent work
will appear. If I had a regular income at the moment, I probably
would not mind. But since I have to sign away the rights to my
work without remuneration at a time when I do not have an income,
I find this arrangement very hard to take.

Although the book has gone through the refereeing process and been
accepted, if I were now to simply release it on the internet
or publish the camera ready copy myself in hardcopy (which is all
that Springer really does), it would be regarded as an unrefereed
publication. The work apparently derives its legitimacy solely from
the fact that Springer Verlag is able to make a profit on it.

Let us assume a retail price of about $40 per book for a 200 page
volume of Springer Lecture Notes (this being the approximate
size of the book). Let us ignore the fact of payment in kind
and pretend that 25 useless copies of the author's book (I am only
entitled to 25 instead of the usual 50 because technically there is
a coauthor; actually, they might have reduced the number of free
copies to authors below 50, I don't remember right now) represent
a value 25 x $40 = $1000, even though it costs the publisher much less
to produce it. 

If I had some assurance of receiving substantially more than that
in donations, I would immediately release the book for free
distribution over the internet. People could download their own
copies and could also give copies to their libraries. I would then use
the donations to purchase equipment that I need for desktop publishing
(copiers, cutters, collators, etc.). I presently do not have access to
a free print shop for making and distributing hard copy in the
form of books and pamphlets and I need to acquire such access if
I am ever going to be truly independent of the parasites in the
publishing industry.

I do not really want to get involved in the acquisition and
maintenance of publishing equipment. I would much prefer it if I
had free access to a non-commercial but well-supplied printing
facility where I could produce good book quality bound hardcopy, perhaps a
cooperative of some kind, and where above all I did not have to sign
away my rights to my own work just to get it into print. When there
exists such a facility, then there will be no contradiction between
publishing in print and publishing on the internet.

Allan Adler
adler@pulsar.cs.wku.edu

