Copyright and Open Access: Reconsidering University Ownership of Faculty Research
33 Pages Posted: 12 Jun 2014
Date Written: May 1, 2006
Abstract
Timely access to scholarly research is critical both to researchers and to professionals who can put the results into practice. Unfortunately, access is increasingly threatened by the rising costs of academic journals and overburdened library budgets. The irony is not lost on university administrators, who complain that commercial publishers obtain research articles for free from university faculty, enlist other faculty as unpaid reviewers and editors, and then charge exorbitant prices to sell the results back to the universities that paid for the research in the first place. Open-access journals offering content without charge are a significant advance, but for the foreseeable future most important research is still likely to appear in more traditional journals. Electronic repositories that make research articles freely accessible to interested users are more promising, but their development is hindered by copyrights acquired from authors by publishers. It is unrealistic, as some have suggested, to expect authors to solve the problem by harder bargaining over copyrights. This Article makes a more controversial suggestion. Universities should claim what they already own by invoking their rights in faculty research under the work-for-hire doctrine. Armed with a right to authorize electronic access to the entire research output of their faculties, universities could facilitate the development of comprehensive open-access repositories, or at least extract significant concessions on access from publishers.
Keywords: copyright, open access, faculty research, academic publishing, work for hire
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