Some years ago, when I was on the Marquette Law Review editorial board, my responsibilities included obtaining a rudimentary copyright release from authors whose articles we had agreed to publish.  In fact, I signed the form myself when I published my Note.  If we did not obtain the release, we would not publish the article.  I presume this is still the Review’s policy, although current members can confirm or deny it, and I also suspect that many journals have a similar procedure.  If the “open access” movement continues to gather steam, however, one can wonder how long this and similar practices will continue.    For example, Professor Steven Shavell recently posted a draft, pre-publication article for public comment arguing that we should abolish copyright for all academic writings.

The open access debate goes well beyond the world of academia, and what follows is only a brief summary.  Many open access advocates support both free online access to works as well as the granting of a license that permits copying and redistribution of the work.  They underscore the broad societal benefits that would flow from broad public access to such information.  Opponents of the movement have argued that true open access is impossible because publishers could not then recover the costs of their work, and that all but a few scholarly journals would cease to exist.  The usual response to this criticism is that the journals could simply charge the authors fees to cover their costs in publishing such works (and, in turn, that the fees would likely be paid by the authors’ university employers).  Perhaps this counterargument is less attractive given the current global economic downturn.

I think the fundamental question is the following: what motivates academic authors to write and publish journal articles? 

My sense is that they do so primarily in order to garner scholarly acclaim and, at least at first, to secure tenure.  It therefore seems to me that such authors would obtain the maximum benefit from the broadest possible distribution of their articles.  Professor Shavell applies these conclusions to all academic works.  However, I understand why the arguments may not hold with respect to other academic publications such as textbooks, given the more predominantly economic reasons for which academic authors might undertake such projects. 

I am, of course, curious as to whether the abolition of copyright in either form (for academic journal articles, or for all academic works) would be of concern to this blog’s readers.