As described, an instructor recommends readings to students, the students
themselves individually copy these readings; the originals are made
available through a departmental library collection, the copy machine
belongs to the department, but the students pay for the copies.
My understanding is that individuals, students or faculty, may individually
copy sections of copyrighted works for study and research purposes without
incurring royalty fees. Clearly a department has the right to hold the
originals in its collection, and an instructor has the right to issue a
reading list.
What is not legal, I believe, is for the university or a private copy shop
to make bulk copies and sell them. Perhaps even to make individual copies
and sell them. If they are selling you a copy, it's illegal. If they are
providing the opportunity for you to make your own copy, it's legal. If you
pay them to make an individual copy, and they do the actual labor, we are
in the grey area.
In my university there is an agency that makes bulk copies of readings and
sells them to students; they pay royalties through a publishers'
consortium. There are also a couple of small private copy shops; they hold
master copies of originals and as students come in (in theory) and request
a copy of a particular document, they make it and charge for the copying
(as opposed to selling a copy of the document -- which is the tricky
distinction).
Do consult your university counsel; she may squirm but not have a heart
attack. If you are too far into the grey area, or if I'm wrong and you are
over the line, it's not that hard to arrange for the royalties to be paid,
and in many cases they are do not increase costs that much.
Some academic journal publishers do charge rather steep per page royalties
(10-20 cents per page), but these are supposed to apply to private
commercial uses.
Almost none of this money goes to support research. It does not come back
to authors. If the journal comes from a professional association or
non-profit, there may be some benefit to the research community. The
present system, if the publishers insist on milking it for profits in a way
that makes the research community, and our students, pay for what we
produce, but does not return a significant part of this money to support
what we do -- may need to be actively resisted by us.
Some publishers hope for, and many librarians and researchers fear, that in
the not too distant future, everyone will pay high prices per page for
access to journal and book content delivered on-line. There will be no free
information in our "democratic" society. There will be no equal access. The
tradition of the free public library will be dead.
I even doubt that a market economy in research publications will do much to
improve average quality -- it will be just too cheap and easy to put
material on-line and wait and see what sells.
The alternative is for us to publish ourselves on the web, with our
institutions providing the servers and connections (a fixed cost, more or
less). Professional organizations can then sell subscriptions to "XMCA
Recommends", lists of links to recently posted articles that the
organizations reviewers have evaluated, sent by email or available at a
website by password (if priced to recover operating costs) or not (if
free). A few entrepreneurial researchers with big followings and dire
financial needs (or no institutional support) might charge for access to
their work, but at least then the money would be going to support the
researcher, not the publisher.
Publishers used to be necessary. In less than 10 years they won't be, at
least not for research communities.
What is the Erlbaum/MCA policy regarding "fair use" copying for research
and study purposes? What is the royalty charge for copies of MCA articles?
and who gets the money?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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