Copyright law reform

Friends, In an interview given to *SciDevNet* in 2009, Prof. Balaram said, "I argue that we should be permitted to put in the repository the full text article as it appears in a journal. For this, countries such as India should have a law specifying that the copyright for articles published with publicly-funded research always vests with the authors and their institutions. [See https://www.scidev.net/global/features/q-a-open-archives-the-alternative-to-... ]. Recently, Prof. Peter Suber of Harvard University has argued that journals DO NOT NEED exclusive rights to publish papers. Please see https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/article/id/1869/?s=03. Here is Suber's Abstract: "Journal publishers don’t need exclusive rights. Or, they don’t need them for publishing. They don’t need them to make a work public or to add value in the form of peer review, copy editing, metadata, formatting, discoverability, or preservation. Nor do they need them to make enough money to pay their bills and grow. Publishers only need exclusive rights for monopoly control over the published work and any revenue it might yield. Publishers who say they need exclusive rights are saying they need this monopoly control. The best evidence that journal publishers don’t need exclusive rights is that so many peer-reviewed journals do without them, for example, open access journals using CC-BY." Nine years have passed since Prof. Balaram wrote it. The copyright law has not been amended to accommodate Prof. Balaram's suggestion. Will the LIS community, in some sense custodians of knowledge in our academic and other research performing institutions, take it up with the concerned Ministry and different funding agencies in India? Regards. Arun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
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Subbiah Arunachalam