The Case for Scholars' Management of Author Rights

I work with faculty at the University of California Irvine (UCI) who are interested in experimenting with new forms of scholarly communication. These faculty members want to preserve the best of the current system in any new venture, such as the opportunities presented by the UC eScholarship initiatives. My discussions indicate that they perceive that "the best" of the current system primarily includes three things: personal impact for their work, social impact for their work, and future impact through the unfettered reuse of their own intellectual property. I have come to the conclusion that these three types of impact are best served by scholars managing the rights to their own intellectual output so that they are free to contribute to new collections and reuse their own work in a variety of ways.

There are a few "big picture" points that I would like to make as the context within which I have come to this conclusion. First, the current system of scholarly communication is intended to promote international, open communication. The very nature of the academy depends upon open communication. Teaching and research are symbiotic processes that require the sharing of newly discovered information and feeding it back into an open communication loop for others to build upon. Second, the nature of the public investment in scientific and scholarly communication argues for the widest possible access to scholarly information. Public coffers provide grants, offices, laboratory facilities, graduate student stipends, and salaries as faculty spend time writing, editing, and peer-reviewing articles for publication. The public is entitled to some return on that investment in the form of wide dissemination of the information created. And third, the nature of information itself mitigates against it being contained within barriers. Harlan Cleveland, president emeritus of the World Academy of Art and Science, once stated that information tends to leak, it is diffusive and the more it leaks the more we have—it expands as it is used.¹

However, proprietary interests have entered the scholarly communication process and created price and permission barriers that are overreaching the foundations of openness that are so essential to the health of the scholarly communication process. We, as librarians, are very familiar with the price barriers that are growing every year. On the topic of permission barriers, one research university librarian recently stated that publishers now want to use copyrights as permission barriers to preside over the life...or death…of information. And the merger effect among scientific publishers has consolidated these permission barriers in the hands of the few, as has the scholarly societies' outsourcing of publication to commercial publishers. ARL has called this a "silent crisis" that has been 40 years in the making. Overreaching price and permission barriers that inhibit a reasonably open flow of information are in direct contradiction to the mission of the academy, public investment in that mission, and the nature of information itself. The best option for breaking down these barriers is for faculty to retain rights and ensure that their works are accessible as broadly as possible.

Personal Impact

Within the contentious landscape of proprietary and public interests, individual scholars are still looking for personal impact for their publications. The measure of success is not just having an article accepted in a traditionally prestigious title; success also includes being cited by others. Formerly, being published in the "right" journal was the only sure way to both a wide readership and multiple citations, but now there is good news on this front for scholars who are willing to venture outside traditional publishing boundaries. A recent study by Kristin Antelman indicates that open access increased citation rates from 45 percent to 91 percent in science/social science articles.² Steve Lawrence did a similar study of 120,000 computer science articles and discovered similar evidence.³ However, scholars need to retain the right to contribute to open access collections if they are to realize this increased personal impact.

Social Impact

Scholars care about social impact as well as personal success. The public investment in research, which was mentioned above, is an added incentive to the natural urge...