Copyright and Open Access Book Publishing: legal questions

12 suggestions for Open Access Scientific Book Publishing

Eberhard R. Hilf, Institute for Science Networking Oldenburg, Germany
  1. Books are, in contrast to the sketchy journal articles, seen as selfcontained information vehicles, giving full and complete information on a chosen topic.
  2. Science research work needs full immediate online access to the full information given in a re-usable form: thus Open Access;
  3. eLearning books do need the same policy, the more students use it the better for the science future;
  4. Only Online version can transmit full information, independent of size, make full use of interactive pieces and linking to further material;
  5. OA science books need long term archiving, thus non-proprietary formats;
  6. OA science books need intelligent content embedding;
  7. Commercial publishing business models need stable future-oriented market regulations set by the government by a suitable legislation;
  8. Market regulations have to assure a competitive market thus allowing parallel competitive same services by different companies: i.e. parallel independent refereeing, printing on demand, content embedding of the same book; (law needed No.1);
  9. Government has by legislation to assure long term archiving, readability and integrity of the books materials entered (law No.2);
  10. Government has by legislation to give the authors the right to be correctly cited (law No.3);
  11. Copyright law has to assure that publishers are not allowed to hold back scientific information they gain, or have gained in the past, to any one, e.g. for reasons of commercial interest (law No.4).
  12. Science books are in the public interest. Thus it needs legislation to push the market towards the most powerful books, to assure financing the sector, and linked to that, to control the competiveness of the market and the price-worthyness.

Status: 15th March 2010; response to hilf (at) isn-oldenburg.de