 Well, thank you for this opportunity to speak with you. And I think Alma has done a great job of providing background on these issues. I wanted to pick up on, as Alma said, on one of the issues that she raised, which is this issue of ownership of the research outputs of the universities. Who owns the research outputs? In particular, the written results of research in universities. And when I talk about ownership, I guess we should construe this as who has what rights with respect to the research outputs. And in keeping with the goals that Alma spoke about at the beginning of her comments, how can we maximize the rights that the general public has to these research outputs? How can we maximize the comments? So as background to this discussion, I want to talk about what motivates academics. I'll mention three things. Of course, there are many things that motivate academics to do what they do. But I'll mention three things that certainly motivate academics. First of all, certainly curiosity is one. Curiosity, which leads to an insatiable urge to learn and discover. Curiosity is often the thing that leads people to become academics in the first place. That's what leads to the research generating outputs in the first place. Second of all, what motivates academics is vanity. Curiosity without vanity leads to a kind of monastic scholarship of the sort that we saw in the early history of the university that Charles Nessin alluded to. But vanity leads academics to actually want to distribute their knowledge to their own credit and also, as it happens, to the greater knowledge of society. So vanity is a second motivator. And the third, which I won't talk about at the moment, but I'll come back to later, motivating academics, is laziness. So curiosity, vanity, and laziness. And I'll mention not necessarily in that order. So the good news is that in the case of university research, the ownership of the research outputs start out with actors who are both curious and vain. This means that in general, academics have interest in generating knowledge and in distributing it, in part to their own greater glory, that is, in maximizing the commons. So that's good, that the right, the ownership of the knowledge starts with actors who have that greater good in mind, if sometimes altruistically, but sometimes only accidentally. But either way, it's a good thing. Well, I want to talk about how those ownership issues change as they go through the normal process of rights transference. And again, as I said, I'll concentrate on how this works with respect to published research results typically in articles, peer reviewed articles. If people are interested, we can talk about other aspects, what happens with data, with physical research material software and the like, which presents somewhat different issues. Now, as I almost said, in the days of print, the public couldn't exercise these rights, sorry, the researchers couldn't exercise these rights without expensive printing and distribution, which was provided for by third parties that had special expertise at capital. And these overheads were paid for through limiting access to those who were willing to pay through subscriptions. In order to distribute the research results, publishers needed rights to do that, which they received from the author, typically through a transfer of copyright, but the rights started with the author. So in this little diagram, which I promise we'll get a little bit bigger in a moment, it depicts the state of play when the author owns the rights. So this little A for author, the dark gray, indicating that that's where the rights are sitting. There is a technical question I'll mention very briefly about why it is that authors have rights to the articles that they publish. Why do they have copyright in articles that they publish when they're working for a university that employs them to write these very articles? Wouldn't the university own the rights to the articles? Well, I'm not a lawyer. There are many in the audience who are much more qualified than I. To answer this question, my understanding is that by convention, there's an exception in copyright that essentially exempts authors from work for hire conditions so that, sorry, exempts teachers from work for hire conditions so that they own rights in their research papers. It's not clear whether the exemption is one which copyright vests with the author or copyright vests instead with the university which immediately transfers it to the author. I'm not sure that there's any great import to the distinction one way or the other upon writing these articles, the author receives the rights. But eventually, the author transfers these rights, typically through a copyright transfer to a publisher. And here in the diagram, P is the publisher. The author, through a copyright transfer, gives the rights to the publisher. Now, the publisher has the rights and the author in general does not. And here's an example of such a copyright agreement. It says that the undersigned transfers to the extent that there is copyright to be transferred, the exclusive copyright interest in the cited manuscript, et cetera, et cetera, to the American Chemical Society. This happens to be language from the American Chemical Society's copyright agreement. So now, in return for the publisher publishing the article, the author has transferred those rights and given them up to a different actor or publisher. Now in general also, these copyright agreements may have some retention of rights for the author. Here it's the part following the phrase subject to the following. So the publisher may, in effect, transfer back rights to the author. Some rights may be retained in the case of the American Chemical Society. The pertinent right here is that the undersigned author, let's see, can revise the paper, can distribute it to not more than 50 colleagues as provided the appropriate credit is given to the American Chemical Society. So the author does retain these small number of limited rights by virtue of having them transferred back to the publisher. Here's another example from another publisher, the Nature Publishing Group. Similar kind of situation. They don't call it a copyright transfer. They call it an exclusive license, but it amounts to much the same thing. Nature Publishing Group acquires exclusive license to publish, reproduce, distribute, display, store the contribution to translate it into other languages to create derivative works, and so forth. But again, the authors retain certain non-exclusive rights, namely to post a copy on the author's own website or institutional repository six months after publication. So it's the same kind of process going on. We start with the rights in the hands of the author who has interest in making them as broadly available as possible, but then they're immediately transferred, not immediately, they're transferred at a certain point to a publisher who immediately provides some limited rights retention at the publisher's interest. So this happens over and over and over again over many different articles, and the end result is the right starting with the authors, but in the end, the authors have very limited rights, just those that the publishers allow them to retain. Every once in a while, an author will engage in negotiation with a publisher to retain more rights. I've done this more or less uniformly over the last, oh, I don't know, 15 years or so, and a few other people I know of do this kind of thing. It's not a very pleasant thing to have to do, but it does allow you often to retain much larger rights. So I've represented that by this case in the middle where the author, in addition to granting appropriate rights to the publisher also by virtue of negotiating and managing the copyright agreement and some back and forth with the publisher also makes sure that the author has broad rights as well. So this brings me to the topic of laziness. Laziness affects this process in two ways. First, this rights negotiation, article by article, requires effort, and anything that requires effort is unlikely to be taken up wholesale by academics who are a little bit lazy. So it's quite rare. So that's why in general you see in this little diagram more or less in all the cases, the rights retention is very limited only in the occasional case do you see large rights retention. The second place where it becomes pertinent is in taking advantage of these retained rights, even the ones that are retained by default. Taking advantage of those retained rights also requires effort, not very much effort, but a little bit. It requires, say, a deposit of the article into an open repository that an institution might run. And consequently, to the extent that academics are lazy, they aren't going to go through that effort. In general, so even to the extent that rights are retained as in the diagram we may not see them being taken advantage of as fully as they might. Well, so I wanna turn to what can be done in a practical sense about these practical problems with ownership and rights retention. In particular, these two issues of the problem of rights negotiation and of obtaining of actual distribution with respect to whatever rights happened to be retained. Well, I'll talk about the latter first. How can we get around the laziness of faculty to actually deposit their works? One proposal to mitigate this second problem is a kind of policy that requires a deposit mandate and various people have proposed this kind of solution, most notably, Stephen Harnad, and it seems like a quite good idea to me. It doesn't affect ownership or rights in any way. It just says that members of the academic community who are subject to this policy must deposit into their local institutional repository a copy of their final policy. So that whatever rights happen to be retained can actually be made use of. So it's a simple kind of policy and to the extent that a mandate on faculty is effective in actually engaging change in their behavior, it could be useful. I think it's safe to say that the extent to which this actually causes changes in behavior probably varies among institutions. Certainly in some cases it's been very effective in others, perhaps, not so much, but it's worth trying. So that's deposit mandate to mitigate this problem of at least being able to take advantage of whatever rights are retained. But there's still this problem that the rights that are retained are limited and they're dependent on the good graces of publishers whose interests aren't the same as the authors who generated the content in the first place or the universities where they work. So what to do about this second problem, it was actually the first problem, retaining broader rights in interactions with publishers despite the laziness of academics. Well, so this is a different kind of policy, a rights retention open access policy and the way it works is by getting a faculty to make an overt statement granting a third party some rights. The idea is, and here's a kind of statement of the core clause in the policy that each faculty member grants to their university permission to make available their scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. So the university becomes kind of a convenient third party to temporarily hold these rights on behalf of the author. So what happens if we have this policy in force at a university? Well, this policy by itself is a grant of rights, it's a non-exclusive license from an author now to a university as depicted by this little arrow at the top. So the author, the moment copyright bests in the article from the moment of its creation, the author grants a license to the university. And the wording here is crucial in the policy. It doesn't say each faculty member will grant to the university, which would require later that the faculty member actually do grant. No, it says each faculty member grants. This is the grant. The policy is the grant of the license, which means that the grant happens at the moment copyright bests in the article. And therefore it comes before the later transfer of the copyright, if any, to a publisher. So there's a non-exclusive license prior to the copyright transfer. The university then holds an un-exclusive license independent of what the arrangement is with the publisher and can make use of that in various ways. In particular, can transfer those rights back to the author, as I've depicted here in the diagram. So the author, instead of retaining limited rights by virtue of the university's grant to the author, can retain broad rights. The university has rights to distribute broadly as well, so that if the article is in the university's repository, it can be distributed quite broadly. In fact, all of copyright can be exercised in those articles, subject to whatever limitations the university wants to place on itself or the policy places on the university. For instance, the version of this policy, which is now in place at various schools, now five schools at Harvard University, places a non-commercial limitation on the exercise of copyright by the university, which seems reasonable to me. Now, we always want this kind of policy to work in the interest of the faculty members who, at the university, who have enacted it on their own collective behalf, and to make sure that that's true, to make sure that the faculty members always have a free choice in the matter of what rights they grant. We put in a waiver provision that says that the university will waive application of the license for a particular article whenever a faculty member asks for that waiver to occur, at the sole discretion of the author. So if for any reason an author doesn't want the university to have this license, he or she can obtain a waiver. And just for good measure, we can put in a deposit mandate as well that each faculty member provides a copy of the author's final version for distribution from the institutional repository. So what's the effect of this kind of policy? Well, now we have, in general, quite a different configuration. We have the university, in general, being granted a license, broad rights of distribution and use for all of the articles written by a group of faculty. With an occasional exception, when a waiver is requested as in this, one of these cases in this diagram, I've depicted the dashed line showing that a waiver was granted, was requested by the author, then the university doesn't receive rights and then the author can't get them back, the publisher will govern what rights the author retains in that case. So that's the distinction between these two policies. In one case, authors retain whatever rights publishers happen to allow unless some overt rights negotiation takes place whereas under a rights retention open access policy, by default, they're very broad rights unless an explicit waiver is generated. Let me mention a few properties of these two policies, some distinctions between them. Well, we'll start with choice. This is not a distinction between them. In both cases, the status quo policy of performing rights retention according to what a publisher allows and a rights retention OA policy, in both cases, authors have free choice as to how they want to manage their retained rights. You can freely choose under the status quo to negotiate with a publisher to retain broader rights. You can freely choose to get a waiver of the license to the university in the case of the rights retention policy. So you have free choice as to whether or not rights are retained in both of these policies. Under the status quo policy, the rights in general are governed by the publisher. Under a rights retention policy, they're governed by an institution that is to say by a collective of academics like the authors themselves. Under the status quo, if publishers decide to reduce the retained rights, as there are now beginning to be some signs that they are, then the rights retention is subject to that kind of retrenchment of retained rights on the part of publishers. Under a rights retention open access policy, the retained rights are subject to a systematic pushback from publishers. If publishers decide systematically that in order to publish articles from an institution with such a policy, they will require that the authors get waivers of these kinds of licenses. Then in general, the authors will get those waivers. Authors are loath to enter into these kinds of arguments with publishers. So the amount of rights retention is subject to systematic publisher pushback. Importantly, in the case of the status quo, expanding rights retention requires many individual negotiations by many individual and basically lazy academics. And under a rights retention open access policy, broad rights retention requires only a single vote at one moment in time by a group of essentially lazy academics. So if you're trying to deal with lazy academics, better to try to get them to do one thing once than lots of things many, many times over. The status quo fails in retaining rights in the face of faculty inaction. If faculty don't do anything, then no broader rights are retained. Under a rights retention open access policy, faculty inaction is an optimal course of events. Once the policy is enforced, if faculty do nothing, they've retained rights. Only if they take an overt act to direct that a waiver of the license be granted do the rights get reduced. So I've described this kind of rights retention open access policy with three parts, a permission part, not a social license to a university, a waiver part, open waiver for any reason at the sole discretion of the author and a deposit part that the author is required to provide a copy of the article as a kind of an abstract notion, but of course it isn't an abstract notion, it's been implemented in various universities in the United States. I don't know of any in Europe that have taken this approach, although I should say that many in Europe have taken at least the deposit mandate approach, which also is a valid and valuable approach to an open access policy. Here's a list of universities and faculties that have this kind of policy. The first was voted by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously on February 12th of 2008. So we now have a couple of years experience, over two years of experience with this policy at Harvard. And now five schools at Harvard have passed these policies, including the law school, the government school, the ed school, education school, and the business school. It's also been passed at other universities, including Stanford, MIT, University of Kansas, smaller colleges such as Oberlin, individual departments in some places. So beginning to be a few places that have instituted these policies, and the nice thing about these policies is every university that passes this policy gets the benefit in terms of rights retention immediately. It doesn't depend on other universities also passing the policy. So I'll mention just briefly some of the reactions to the policy. Our local newspaper, The Boston Globe, called the initial Faculty of Arts and Sciences vote a bold move to boost the unrestricted global use of research articles. Since I'm the speaker, I get to pick the quotes about the policy that you get to see. But it wasn't just in Boston that we got good press here in Italy. We got a statement from the Italian Corriere della Sera that the Harvard decision will accelerate the ongoing process of reorganizing the means by which knowledge is disseminated. I apologize if I mistranslated that. That's not what it says, that's what it should have said. Now, in all fairness, I have to give equal time, I suppose, to less positive reviews of this idea. Here's the Association of American Publishers who said that this is a vendor customer dispute over price. It doesn't surprise us that all libraries feel their budgets are far less than desirable. But that's a reality the educational community faces. So, of course, when the AAP says that budgets are far less than desirable, what they mean by desirable is what would be desirable from the point of view of the AAP. And then finally, here's a comment from Inside Higher Education. Harvard's self-serving move weakened standards of peer review processes. Now, this shows a complete misunderstanding of the policy. It has nothing to do with peer review policy. It has processes. All of the articles that we're talking about that are being subject to rights retention are still going to publishers through the normal peer review process. They were accepted for publication based on peer review. And all the normal processes are followed. It's just that the authors' manuscripts have broad rights retention because of the policy. And then they go on to say that the policy presumes that any garbage Harvard prof's right would have been worthy of publication. So this part is actually true, but it's irrelevant to the policy. I'll raise some issues here very briefly. And I won't go into detail if people want to ask questions about them. I'm happy to talk further. There have been worries about this kind of policy, doesn't it restrict my academic freedom? Will this damage junior faculties? Careers will this drive publishers out of business or kill scholarly societies or as seems to be implied in that last inside higher ed quote and peer review? And the answers in general are no, it doesn't. And the crucial point here is that no article need ever have its publication affected in any way because of this policy. It's because of the waiver provision of the policy for no other reason. You can always get a waiver of the policy and revert the situation of that article to the status quo. And finally, I'll mention the policy in practice that people may wonder about. We now have experience with the policy. We've been working with the policy for two years. We understand how it works and how to deal with it. And we know now that causing this kind of policy to be in effect at a university doesn't cause the sky to fall. The whole world of scholarly communication doesn't end just because a university passes this kind of policy. Because I've run over my time already. I'll stop here if people are interested in these kinds of questions and publish your reaction and whether articles are just waivers being generated for all the articles, those kinds of things. I'm happy to talk to them if there's time for questions. So I'll stop there. Thank you very much.