Access Copyright has been lobbying hard to oppose the best solution to the problem of textbook pricing and potentially illegal copying of textbooks. Access Copyright is an administrative body for a largely outdated business model, namely the collecting of royalties for any copying of literary works. While this model made sense in the past when copying was more expensive, with photocopiers and the Internet there are far better solutions.
There is a movement in many circles, including academia, towards something called "Open Access". With this model you resource the development of the material once, often in collaboration with many institutions, and then allow all the potential audiences to freely copy the material without additional per-copy fees. This model is being adopted by a growing number of journals, and textbooks are a very logical area to move into....Access Copyright, seeing the threats to their antiquated way of doing business, has been very busy in lobbying the government to make modern alternatives either impossible or impractical. They are attacking the Internet where many authors are intending their materials to be redistributed royalty-free, with Access Copyright trying to claim the right to collect royalties from any use of material on the Internet.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/18/2006 09:39:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
