The Perils of Strong Copyright

According to Word, without Bibliography but including footnotes, it’s 12,504 words. There are simply different requirements for the degree at different institutions, especially across countries. Even simply in the US, there are schools that award a Masters in Library Science and don’t require ANY final paper…the coursework and an exam are all that is necessary.

Here at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, there is no minimum length requirement for Master’s Papers. The only requirement is that your advisor approves it (in my case, Paul Jones, the director of Ibiblio.org).

Thanks so much for the feedback (although I wish you’d left your email so that I could have done this via private email rather than through the comments!)

yippee! you’re my first personally-known famous librarian! congratulations!

Ha…Robert, that was the point of the entire exercise. 🙂 We’ll see if it gets “noticed” by any library-types as the week progresses. My goal is to work the last few chapters into an article, and submit it to a few ILS journals. We’ll see if any of them accept it. 🙂

I was wondering where all the unt.edu hits were coming from. 🙂 I’d love to see a copy of the presentation! Actually, I’d love to see ANY references to the paper, actually…if it shows up on an ILS listserv or blog, I’d love to see what was said. Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

Jason, your paper is ruddy brilliant. If I thought I could get away with printing 80 pages on the shared work printer, I’d take a print copy with me when Michael Gorman comes to my school campus this afternoon to talk about future directions of ALA.

And I almost put this in my blog: After reading Jason’s thesis, I’m quite tempted to take my own and bury it under the light of a full moon, at a crossroads, with a stake of holly and a head of garlic, because it doesn’t deserve to see the light of day, even if it’s accepted.

I hope you’re happy, young man. :> If our schedules sync up in Orlando, I owe you a beer.

I knew Jason before he was famous — he rocked then, too.

Maybe I missed this, but has this been peer-reviewed or at least graded?

Approval and required signature from highly respected, tenured, graduate professor. That has to “count.” Whatever that means.

I’ll say that sometimes this is true. I’d give a lot more attention to a book by Lessig than I would someone I’d never heard of. At the same time, the director of my papers name is on the title page. As well, I think any distinction between “formal” and “informal” publication in these days of the web is tenuous at best.

If this had been published anonymously…would that have made a significant difference in the content? These are important questions in our day of digital publication. Personally, I am not often tempted by appeal to authority. I’d rather have coherence of appreciation, where many people find a work useful. The fact that many people seem to be interested in the work, and that they seem to find value in it is more important to me than any single authority figure (whether we’re talking about my paper, or any other). This is the reason that I place a high level of value on the Wikipedia (and the web in general).

I would agree that often editorial review assists in making a paper a better paper, mainly through a process of question and answer vis a vis the author being forced to explain himself in a more precise manner. I am equally certain that slapping a grade on it would make no difference whatsoever in the content, nor in the “authority” of the paper. As well, I’d hope that we expect the author of the paper to be responsible for the references. I wouldn’t want to produce any work that I felt it necessary for an editor to double check my references.

Theses have always been accepted as an authoritative work.

Having completed a thesis myself and known many others that have been through the process, a thesis is a reputable source of new ideas, and in many cases is reviewed and analysed through the examination process much more closely than many peer reviewed papers.

Jason – are you going to submit your paper to the digital theses program too, as well as having it on your own site? It’s a good resource, and needs to grow with the help of excellent theses such as yours.

Great to see a thesis on this topic, very timely. Congratulations on the wide readership that it is getting.

Re: JMLA and T. Scott Plutchak’s comment (#27)

Page 32, footnote #1…introduction of journal choices:

“[1] They are either publications of divisions or sections of the ALA. The sole exception of this, to the best of my knowledge, is the Journal of the Medical Library Association. ”

I was aware of the distinction you made, and was very careful to point out that the JMLA is not a publication of the ALA. It was largely included in order to have further examples of copyright statements to draw from in order to show the differences in copyright statements in academic library journals. I will attempt to be more clear in the revision of my paper for publication as to the state of the JMLA as a seperate entity (I assume that the above statement was either missed in your reading, or you did not believe that it was clear enough. In either case, I should be more clear).

From T. Scott Plutchak, and the JMLA:

1) The footnote refers back to the sentence that reads “There are seven journals that are connected in some manner to ALA…” In that context, the footnote can only be interpreted to mean that while JMLA is not a product of one of the divisions or sections, it is still a product of ALA. I repeat, the JMLA is not now nor has it ever been in any way connected to ALA.

2) In the paragraph that follows the list of journals you will be analyzing, you say that you “took these as a representative sample of scholarly ALA publications.” How is the reader to deduce from this that JMLA is not an ALA publication?

3) The intro paragraph to your chart states, “it seems enlightening to compare and contrast the various copyright licenses of the ALA journals in question…” Again, this clearly implies that JMLA is an ALA journal.

4) Appendix 1 is titled: ALA Copyright policies. The JMLA copyright license agreement is included with nothing to differentiate it from the others.

5) Your introductory paragraph to Chapter Five says that you will turn your “eye towards the ALA itself, and examine a list of its more popular serial publications” and you end that paragraph by saying that you will now “turn to an examination of the scholarly journals of the ALA.” There is nothing here to indicate that you are looking at non-ALA journals.

6) Nowhere do you mention the existence of the Medical Library Association. In your email you say you included JMLA because you wanted to show the differences in copyright statements in academic library journals — but the entire thrust and focus of your argument is about the ALA, and nowhere in the paper do you suggest that you included the JMLA as an example of an academic library journal published by a different entity.

Jason — I apologize for not reading the entire paper and have only been following the comments Scott has made re: references to the JMLA and the Medical Library Association. I think you might want to explore the MLA situation with Scott further as a means of contrasting what one library association did (MLA) vs. what another library association should do (ALA) about living up to its message about copyright and open access. If I understand the point of your paper, library associations who “preach” open access have to live up to its own message. This is exactly what the MLA did, and I think many of its members are very pleased. It certainly makes it easier for us health sciences librarians to promote open access when we have our professional associations backing us up with action, not just words.
I encourage you to submit your paper for publication. Hope this message helps.
Jim