Copyright and research: an archivangelist’s perspective

Conflation of academic copyright issues with respect to books (whether text books, research monographs or popularisations) and research articles, is rife in the academic publishing industry. A charitable interpretation is that this is because to publishers they are all effectively the same: a product produced for commercial benefit. An uncharitable interpretation is that this is a classic Fear Uncertainty and Doubt approach, in an attempt to delay the inevitable move to Open Access (OA) to research articles. To authors, however, research articles and books are generally very different things. Research articles are produced without the expectation of direct financial return, whereas books generally include some consideration of financial return. Taylor’s “Copyright and research: an academic publisher’s perspective” (SCRIPT-ed 4:2) falls wholesale into this mental trap and in particular his lauding of the position paper of the Association of American Professional and Scholarly Publishers, shows a lack of understanding of the continuing huge loss to scholarship of a lack of OA to research articles. It should be regarded as a categorical imperative for scholars to embrace OA to research articles.