Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
as an employer's having the right to direct and supervise the way which
the employee carries out his work, the means used for this and the
method by which the employee is paid. The second category of a work
made for hire is that done by an independent contractor. In theory, the
'work made for hire doctrine' means that a university owns the
copyright of works made by its staff. The US courts, however, have
created a 'teacher exception' to the work made for hire doctrine,
allowing academics to own copyright in their works.
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Notwithstanding the copyright law provisions on ownership in the
USA, universities do take different views concerning the appropriate
balance of interests between universities and their academics with
respect to their work (Crews and Wong, 2004).
The scholars' viewpoint
The creators of the information, the scholars, play a pivotal role in the
debate on ownership and in the dissemination of scientific information,
but their voice is not often heard and their opinion is mostly voiced by
librarians and repository managers. They are sometimes approached to
discover their wishes but, on the whole, they are difficult to reach and
they tend not to look after their rights because they are not very
interested in them (Davenport, 1994). Copyright is viewed as a difficult
issue with many exceptions and detailed regulations, and copyright
policies tend not to raise much enthusiasm and response - even when
they aim at wider distribution of scholarly output. When authors are
indeed involved in the drawing up of policy, much is made of this fact
(Crawford, 2008; Suber, 2008).
By interviewing scholars directly, their preferences can be ascertained
(Morris, 2009). Copyright is not a primary concern for them; they are
interested in the dissemination of their works mainly by sending copies
to others outside their institutions and by incorporating them into other
works.
In the copyright arrangement, the position of authors appears to be
largely established; it seems to be generally accepted that the scholarly
author retains the rights to his publications. Nonetheless, the growth of
the Open Access (OA) movement and the increase in the number of
institutional repositories has led to shifts in authors' position within the
copyright arrangement, due to the mandates formulated by several
