The impact of copyright on the future of scholarly publishing

Abstract

I have been invited to write this piece in my role as publisher of some 130 scientific and technical journals. I do not know how to write such a piece from that point of view. It is true that many of us are blinded either by positions of power or achievement so that we think of ourselves in such a delimiting way. I can hold no brief for publishers qua publishers and try to think of myself as a philosopher‐humanist rather than as a publisher. It troubles me that in the realm of the subject that I will be discussing, namely, unbridled photocopying—which, in my opinion, will lead to the imminent demise of the already developed communications skein—we find that this subject has been most often dealt with by technicians (rather than philosophers) driven by their own egos and dreams of power, or by an overweening brashness that assumes that Technology can, of course, supply solutions to all our problems. Technicians have often been called upon to find the Final Solution and philosophers have had a hard time coping with what may seem, on the surface at least, to be something that technicians claim is the solution to the problem mooted. It is, unfortunately, rare that technicians can step back from their own dearly cherished pursuit of technical solutions to problems in order to ask the basic and searching Hegelian philosophical questions that need to be asked a priori. In a small sense, what I have said is unfair to technicians since, before they go to work on the problem, they are either asked to do so qua technicians (a mistake on the part of the askers) or seize their own opportunity without waiting for the invitation. And yet, technicians are not alone in this myopia; ordinary people often opt for what seems like the handy‐dandy rapid solution to all their half‐understanding of the ‘problem’ without giving due consideration to its long‐range consequences.

Citation

Coleman, E. (1977), "The impact of copyright on the future of scholarly publishing", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 29 No. 7, pp. 259-265. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb050600