Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Allen and I do a good deal of talking past each other.  He correctly observes that I don’t address the plaintiffs’ motivations for filing suit, and characterizes those motivations in ways that put the plaintiffs in a favorable light.  Not knowing the plaintiffs’ motivations, I have no substantive comment except to note again, as I did when the suit was filed, that one might hope that university-based presses would enlist the academic leadership of their universities in efforts to mediate academic matters before initiating legal action.  To my knowledge, no such efforts were ever made by Oxford, Cambridge, or their distinguished presses.

The central claim in my blog post and PW piece is that the remedy sought by the plaintiffs is inimical to normal practices of teaching and learning in universities, and would put insupportable burdens on the behavior of faculty in their development and delivery of courses.  Mr. Allen’s response to that central substantive claim is to let it slide by with the following commentary:

I won’t attempt in this space to explain how the plaintiff publishers’ proposed injunction, if approved by the court and properly administered by GSU officials, could simplify the task of making fair use determinations and obtaining permissions to use copyrighted material in an effective, timely manner.

In other words, he asserts that my claim is wrong (or worse) but chooses not to give even a hint as to why or how it might be wrong.

Mr. Allen then goes on explain how all of Georgia State’s problems, and presumably everyone else’s, would be solved if libraries would sign up for the Copyright Clearance Center’s blanket license, which is available at a reasonable price.  Maybe so, but because not all publishers are covered by the CCC license, universities would still have to go through the process of establishing the bonafides of all of the works not covered by the CCC license These would include works published by Cambridge University Press, one of the plaintiffs.  Unless the coverage of CCC licenses were universal, faculty would still be subject to the tender mercies of new university bureaucracies that would be charged with acting as copyright police, requiring faculty to provide information that they often would not have.

Furthermore, for most libraries, many of the works covered by the CCC license are also covered by other licenses that that libraries purchase directly or indirectly from publishers.  Thus the CCC blanket approach would result in libraries paying more than once for rights to some works, while still having to do onerous handwork for works that are not covered by the blanket license.  The simple solution is perhaps not so simple.  [It's worth noting that the CCC is helping to underwrite the cost of the lawsuit.]

With all of that, Tom Allen and I agree on two important points.  He states that “when academic copying and distribution of material clearly constitute fair use, permission is unnecessary.”  I couldn’t be more pleased to see such a ringing affirmation of fair use as an integral element of copyright law from the AAP, although I expect that there might be some substantive disagreements over the clear constitution thereof. Mr. Allen also observes that the “ecosystem that binds educators, librarians and publishers … will survive this litigation over copyright infringement.”   I have no doubt that it will, but not on the terms of the plaintiffs’ proposed order in the Georgia State litigation.

Anyone who is even casually aware of the controversy surrounding the litigation between Cambridge et al and Georgia State University, has almost certainly read some of the very cogent and compelling arguments against the injunction proposed by the publishers. I agree with many of those critiques, and, at the risk of piling on, am adding another: the proposed injunction is a violation of the First Amendment prohibition against restricting speech.

Copyright law is fundamentally about compromise, about fairness, about the balance between providing incentives for authors to create and the ability to harness that creative energy for the betterment of society. Markets abhor a monopoly, but yet we give authors a limited monopoly on their writings so as to better enable them to create for a living. We need laws to protect rights in non-rivalrous goods;objects that can be used by multiple people at once without reducing the ability of others to partake in them. (For example, a candy bar is rivalrous, if I eat it, you cannot. But a sunset, or a song can be enjoyed by all.) But we limit those laws in order to allow society to more efficiently capture the benefit from those goods. It’s really quite an elegant system, and while you can criticize the particulars, creativity, writing, and “the progress of science and the useful arts,” seem to have been proceeding along quite well for the last 200 years.

Authors create, and users use; some of these uses generate profits for the authors, (or, more realistically, their publishers), and some of these uses do not. Sometimes the system swings out of balance. For example, as neat as it was to be able to download any song in the world from Napster, it was also a massive hub of copyright infringement. The balance was upset, the courts intervened, Napster was shuttered, and the balance was restored. (I’ll note here that I’m aware that balance does not often make all parties at the table happy, and that reasonable people can disagree as to where exactly the fulcrum on the balance point should lie). The proposed injunction in the GSU litigation is a threat to copyright’s balance of a far greater scale than was posed by Napster and its ilk. In their proposal, plaintiffs seek to overturn all of the internal and external limits on the exclusive rights granted by copyright, replacing them instead with a mechanical, restrictive, and frankly unworkable system.

Copyright law does not operate in a vacuum. Alongside the internal limits to the rights granted to authors by the Copyright Act, such as the limitations provided by fair use, and the rights granted to libraries, people with disabilities, etc., there are also external limitations, notably the First Amendment. Stating that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech,” the First Amendment limits the capacity of Congress and the courts to restrict the free expression of ideas. Copyright law limits expression by prohibiting some uses of copyrighted works without permission from the copyright holder. Many of the exceptions in the exclusivity of copyright – fair use, classroom use – exist in order facilitate free speech about copyrighted work. Using copyright to effect a ban on speech can arguably be seen as a violation of the First Amendment, as a prior restraint on speech.

First Amendment challenges to injunctions in copyright cases are nothing new, and courts have not proved particularly receptive to them. [1] But the proposed injunction in the GSU litigation is a new beast indeed. Prior first amendment challenges to copyright injunctions have dealt with discreet acts of infringement and identifiable actors, for example, the publication of a possibly infringing book or film. And while courts have expressed deference to the first amendment in these cases, they have not found injunctions to be restraints on speech, because the infringing speech was not protected by the first amendment, as the first amendment protects the facts and ideas underlying the expression, not the actual expression itself.

The scope of the proposed injunction in the GSU litigation goes far beyond existing case law, as it limits all speech, by all actors, in any way associated with GSU. As such, it is not a limit on a particular instance of suspected infringement, but a limit on all potential speech going forward. Prior injunctions have been limited in scope and have stopped the publication of existing works; the proposed injunction chills all future expression coming out of GSU, and leaves no space for the comment, criticism, and dialogue that lies at the center of constitutionally protected speech. In order to open up a new business model, the plaintiffs ask the court to shake the foundations of the balance between incentive and expression; and the price of doing so is simply too high

So, why is this important? Essentially, what is at stake here is the fundamental balance between those who use copyrighted works and those who create them. Reasonable people can disagree over how long copyright should last, or how much deference should be given to fair use; that’s the beauty of our system. The proposed injunction would overturn all that Congress and the courts have crafted over the last two hundred years and replace it with a mechanical regime designed to maximize profits for the large publishing houses. This “solution” to the GSU litigation is not only unworkable, it’s unconstitutional and wrong. Asking academics and universities to surrender their statutory and constitutional rights so as to allow publishers to more efficiently extract revenue from them does nothing to advance the progress of science and the useful arts, and will only further illustrate the absurdity of the state of academic publishing, where universities pay academics to write articles, which they edit, peer review, and give to publishers for free, and which are then sold back to universities for substantial sums. Hopefully Judge Evans will see this, deny the proposed injunction, and help bring this litigation to a resolution that respects both sides of the copyright balance..

[1] For example, see Salinger v. Colting, 607 F.3d 68 (2d Cir. 2010), where the Second Circuit upheld a lower courts ruling prohibiting the publication of the book 60 Years Later Coming Through the Rye, a book based on the events in Catcher in the Rye.

Academic publishers are often in positions adverse to their authors (disagreeing about pricing, royalties, advances etc.)  Similarly, they are often in positions adverse to libraries (pricing again, sometimes licensing terms).  And university-based presses are often in conflict with the university administration, largely over the fiscal relationships between the two.  All of this is as normal as the sun rising in the east and as American (British) as apple (steak-and-kidney) pie.  But in a case currently before a federal court in Atlanta, Cambridge University Press et al  v. Patton et al, three academic publishers, with the support of other publishers’ organizations, notably the Copyright Clearance Center, have taken a position that crosses the boundary from adversary to enemy. [1]

The case is well-known in the world of academic publishing, and is well-described in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and in an excellent blog post by Peggy Hoon. Briefly, the plaintiffs allege (and they may well be correct – determining the facts and law is the point of the lawsuit, and I do not pretend to know the answers) that Georgia State’s practices with regard to electronic reserves violated copyright law.  Because Georgia State is a public institution with 11^th Amendment immunity, the plaintiffs do not seek monetary damages.  Rather, they seek to change radically the interpretation of copyright law as it applies to higher education, and to alter fundamentally the ways in which faculty use copyrighted materials in their teaching.

The plaintiff’s draft order applies formally only to Georgia State, but if the Court grants the plaintiffs what they seek, the result will be, in the words of  Duke University’s Kevin Smith, “a nightmare scenario for higher education:” fair use would be destroyed, university faculty, students, and staff would be subjected to outrageously restrictive copyright policies, and every university would be required to hire a squad of copyright cops to ensure that faculty do the publishers’ bidding. And while it’s not an uncommon strategy to ask for far more than you expect to receive in a negotiation, which this proposed injunction surely is, your “highball” offer is certainly something that you wouldn’t mind having. What the plaintiffs are saying is that they are quite willing impose enormous costs on academic performance and academic freedom in exchange for higher profits.  This is not the request of a friendly adversary; this is the attack of an enemy. (Yes, academic authors would also receive some financial benefit, but note that the typical split for incremental revenue is around 90-10 in favor of publishers, and that the additional revenue that publishers would receive under the plaintiffs’ draft order would be obtained NO additional cost incurred by the publishers beyond cashing checks and paying their lawyers.)

As a faculty member, I do not know that I could comply with the restrictions in the proposed injunction for using copyrighted material in my classroom; they are too onerous and much too expensive.  As an author and an educator, I have a great respect for copyright law, and I believe in a balance between creating incentives for authors and promoting the ”progress of science and the useful arts.”  The proposed injunction does not strike that balance; it unreasonably restricts access to copyrighted works, eliminates fair use, and will force professors to spend much of their time in an exercise of copyright self-censorship. Imagine that if every time you wanted to quote from a text, show an image, or distribute a handout to your students you had to seek the approval of the University Copyright Police; the consequences would be dramatic.  (Lest you think I am exaggerating, check out the form that, were the publishers to have their way, faculty would have to fill out every time they put copyrighted works on electronic reserve.[2])

Call me gullible, but even now I am not fully persuaded that academic publishers are the enemies of faculty and the university. However, I do think that something has gone horribly wrong when entities that were created to serve scholarship employ legal procedures that would hamstring scholars and students who engage in customary and effective behaviors in their teaching and learning. I hope that Judge Evans will recognize that the publishers’ proposal is a plain violation of copyright and would be destructive of vital public purposes.  And I hope that cooler heads will prevail among the plaintiffs as well.  If not, we will have to find other means to a better future than the one which the publishers propose.  Whether that future can include publishers who would behave inimically to the purposes of higher education  is less certain.

[1] I have blogged on this subject before. At that time I bemoaned the fact that the two plaintiffs associated with universities treated a conflict between institutions of higher education as a strictly commercial matter.  I still bemoan that fact, which is at heart of the current problem.  Institutions of higher learning, and their presses, should be mission-driven, not profit-driven.  But I digress.

[2] Not only would faculty have to fill out out this form for every electronic resource that they would use in their course reserves, but it would also need to be checked by University officials who would then make certifications to the publishers. Of course, most faculty would have no practical way to develop the required information, but the Copyright Clearance Center, which is providing financial support for the plaintiffs in the Georgia State Suit, would be happy to provide such certification for a fee. Kevin Smith makes the surprising connection between CCC’s role in this case and the old medieval doctrine of champerty.

The Economist interviewed me about the settlement at some length, and made a podcast that I quite like. It recapitulates fairly painlessly (it’s 13 minutes) some of things that I’ve been saying about the Google lawsuit and settlement for some time.

And, for something completely different and arguably more important, Paul Krugman has a superb piece entitled “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong” in the New York Times Magazine of September 6. What’s remarkable is how economists got it so wrong 70 years after Keynes got it so right. Anyhow, this is a testimonial for Krugman’s piece from an admiring economist.

I learned something important that at some level I already knew.

The most important single thing about the Google settlement, simultaneously its greatest achievement and among its most vexing features, is the treatment of orphaned works (in James Grimmelman’s witticism, “zombie” works). The problem, as we all know, is that there are millions – no one quite knows how many – of works that may or may not be in copyright and for which the rightsholder(s) may or may not exist and may or may not be aware of their rights. Our ability to use these works is thus much compromised: we run the risk that a copyright holder will appear and claim damages. As we all know, Congress’s efforts to make it easier and safer to use orphaned works have failed. Moreover, the most recent draft legislation would have imposed difficult and costly burdens on a potential user by requiring the would-be user to make substantial efforts to find any potential but unknown rightsholder.

Along comes the Google settlement, which solves at least part of the problem, for Google and the Book Rights Registry, at one fell swoop. (Only part of the problem, because works that were not registered with the copyright office will likely not be in the settlement and yet may be just as orphaned as those that are registered.) Under the settlement, revenues generated by orphaned works will be held in escrow for for five years, allowing time for a rightsholder to come forward. It’s a moving window; if the rightsholder comes forward in year 22, she gets revenues from year 17 on. Thus the products that Google sells to individuals and institutions can include, among other works, millions of orphans (zombies). Without the orphans, the great public benefit of the settlement – the ability to find and use much of the literature of the 20th century in digital form – would be much diminished.

At the same time, the disposition of the revenues attributed to orphaned works is one of my least favorite parts of the settlement. The unclaimed revenues go first to support the operations of the BRR, and then, after that, will be used for charitable purposes consistent with the interests of publishers and authors. As the head of a library that has lovingly cared for these works for decades, the notion that the fruits of our labors (and those of many others in many libraries) redound to the benefit of entities that did not write, publish, or curate these works sticks a bit in my craw. So I hope that authors, publishers, the court, and the public will be vigilant in making sure the BRR does not squander the unclaimed revenues on mismanagement, high salaries, and the like. The “charitable purposes” should be an objective, not a remainder for unclaimed funds.

The settlement also gives Google and the BRR, and no one else, the right to use the orphaned works in this way. A number of commentators, have noted problems that may arise from Google’s privileged position in this regard. But there is an obvious solution, one that was endorsed at the Columbia meeting by counsel for the Authors Guild, the AAP, and Google: Congress could pass a law, giving access to the same sort of scheme that Google and the BRR have under the Google Settlement to anyone. And they could pass some other law that makes it possible for people to responsibly use orphaned works, while preserving interests for the missing “parents” should they materialize. Jack Bernard and Susan Kornfield have proposed just such an architecture to “foster” these orphans. Google has also made a proposal that would be a huge improvement.

Given that the parties to the suit, libraries, and the public would all benefit from such legislation, it should be a societal imperative to pass it. I look forward to AAP, the Authors Guild, and Google lobbying and testifying in favor of such legislation. I’d be happy to be there, too.

Broadly, peer review is the set of mechanisms that enable scholars to have reliable access to the informed opinions of other scholars, in a way that allows that those informed opinions themselves to be subject to similar vetting.

Scholarship requires reliable and robust peer review, and the academy engages in peer review in a variety of ways, both direct and indirect. Peer reviewed publication is one method, and a fairly powerful one at that. If you read a paper in (for my field) Econometrica or the Journal of Political of Economy, you are reasonably confident that accomplished scholars in the field have made a judgment that the paper is of high technical quality and worth reading, and that experienced scholars have made a judgment that the paper is of interest beyond its narrow subfield. Those are valuable pieces of news as one is looking for a way to spend some time, and they also tell you something about the likely quality and accessibility of papers outside of one’s specialty, should one be branching out or needing some background information or trying to figure out who to consider for an open position in the department.

Similarly, the appearance of an article in a leading specialized journal, or of a monograph in a prestigious series published by a scholarly press, conveys valuable information (at least to the cognoscenti in the field) about the quality of the book or paper.

The peers who undertake the reviews are genuine peers. They are scholars whose judgment is trusted by experienced members of editorial boards, who are themselves generally senior scholars in the relevant field(s). Such people engage in peer review pretty much all the time. They go to seminars and talks, read draft manuscripts from students and colleagues, near and far, review grant proposals, engage in workshops, and vet tenure and promotion files. In short, the peers doing the reviews are active scholars engaged in active scholarship. (Sometimes they even spend some time writing their own stuff.) They could no more NOT provide “peer review” then they could give up reading and writing. Peer review is part and parcel of what serious scholars do.

I’d guess (and I would love to see a serious study) that the fraction of time that scholars spend engaged in formal peer review of publications – journal articles and monographs — is less than half of the time they spend on peer review in total. Moreover, the work that has traditionally been done under the aegis of publishers is increasingly being done in other settings. In fields where it is customary to post working papers on the web, interesting papers generate a good deal of peer review in the form of commentary from peers. Given that it takes essentially no time to move from word-processor to web posting, and that it often takes years to get from submission to a journal or scholarly press to formal publication, it’s not surprising that informal peer review is becoming more common. This is good news. Scholarship advances more rapidly if work can be widely shared relatively quickly and easily. Given that publication in the literal sense (making public) is now easy and cheap in the technical sense, it seems almost certain that informal review will grow relative to formal review.

For several years, I was the chief academic officer of the University of Michigan, and I have been involved in the review of tenure cases, grant proposals, journal articles and book manuscripts for more than 30 years. The most interesting and important of these activities are reviews associated with tenure and hiring. It is often argued (quite explicitly so by some) that without the reviews associated with publishing, the academy would be at a loss in making judgments about the quality and productivity of scholars. To be sure, for reasons adduced above, a record of publication in strong peer-reviewed settings conveys valuable information to tenure and search committees, chairs, deans, and provosts. But the fact of the matter is that we pay equal attention to other reviews, including (for some fields) those required to obtain research grants, and (for some fields) post-publication reviews that appear in journals and other venues. We also take very seriously the opinions of ad hoc reviewers, inside and outside of our institutions, who prepare and evaluate the case for promotion and hiring. Take away the information conveyed by publication venue, and these tasks become more difficult, to be sure, but by no means impossible. And the essential part – close reading of the work by peer reviewers – remains intact.

Just as it pays for almost all of the content that goes into scholarly publication, so too does the academy – colleges, universities, research centers, and the entitites that fund them – pay almost all of the costs of peer review.

Publishers provide many useful services, but they do not provide peer review. It is the peers themselves who do that essential work.

Publishers have pushed for this bill because they fear that open access mandates will reduce their profits. If people can access the research for free online, who will pay millions of dollars for subscriptions? Lots of people, actually, but that’s another post.

Instead of baldly admitting that what they seek is protection for their dying business model, publishers argue that the NIH Public Access policy violates their copyrights. The assertion is hogwash. Copyrights belong to authors before they belong to publishers. Authors can license their work however they please; the fact that they have traditionally signed over all of their rights to publishers without compensation does not mean they should continue doing so. Indeed, the case can be made that those who pay the authors — including public entities such as NIH and NSF that support research — could require assignment of some or all rights as a condition of receiving the grant in the first place. I wouldn’t favor such a policy, but it’s fatuous to suggest that Congress should limit the scope of contracts between grantors and grantees.

Allan Adler, VP of the Association of American Publishers, issued a statement in which he had the gall to say that “Government does not fund peer-reviewed journal articles—publishers do.”

That’s just not true. The NIH spends over $28 billion in taxpayer money annually to fund research. Researchers write articles about their findings, and their peers review those articles, without compensation from publishers. Without the research, there would be nothing to publish. Largely due to historical accident, publishers manage the peer review process, helping journal editors to badger referees into reviewing articles, generally for no pay. The value of the scientific expertise that goes into refereeing dwarfs that of the office expenses incurred by publishers in managing the process. The referees’ salaries are paid by universities and research institutes, not by publishers. Basically, we have a system in which the public pays for the research, the universities pay for the refereeing, the publishers pay for office work to coordinate the refereeing, and also for some useful editing. Then the publishers turn around and sell the results back to the universities and to the public who bore almost all of the costs in the first place.

The people of the United States pay good money to learn about the world. It would be a travesty if Congress decided that the interests of a few publishers were more important than the research investments of the American public, and that’s exactly what this bill would do.

My reasons are all related to a general point of view about commerce, one that is highly unoriginal (having, famously, been well articulated by Adam Smith in 1776) but powerful nonetheless. The profit motive often leads to great things, and also to good small things. It’s useful to have people out there trying to make money, especially if they are trying to make money by creating works of value, rather than by defending business models and manipulating legislatures to preserve monopolies or squelch competition. As I cannot imagine anything that I write on this blog providing the key to anyone’s predatory monopolies, the remote possibility that what I write could be used in a way that would generate monetary value carries with it the associated possibility that it will be of social or personal value to a user or a reader. The more use the better, and the more that people are looking for customers and users, the better.

I also have a more political motive. I have been known to criticize the behavior of publishers from time to time, but I would not want it thought that I am generally opposed to commerce, or commercialization, and I fear that some people involved in commerce see the “Non Commercial” license as synonymous with “anti-commerce.” It’s okay with me if someone makes some money from my work, even when I don’t. And if the new use is clever or innovative, that’s even better.

The second reason, also closely related, has to do with my attitude towards copyright law. If you believe, as I do, that the purpose of copyright is to “Promote the progress of science and the useful arts”, then it is more important that the work be out in the world being read, and contributing to a larger discourse, than that strangers not be able to make money from it. One maximizes the influence of the work by maximizing potential uses of the work, recognizing that commercial uses have just as much power to promote progress as non-commercial uses, and recognizing that the constitutional basis of copyright — authorizing Congress to grant monopolies for a limited period — contemplated such uses from the get go. (Of course, the limited period has become a bad joke.)

I should point out that under this strategy – the maximizing influence strategy – one would never sign away exclusive rights to one’s own work, because exclusive rights drastically limit the potential distribution channels, and the potential impact.

So, if anyone can make money from this posting, have at it!

The second point is that, according to the Times, Cambridge University Press licenses pages for electronic reserves at 17 cents per student per page, for up to 20 percent of a book. The marginal cost to Cambridge of permitting such use is the billing cost, so the 17 cents is essentially all profit. If a student is willing to go to the effort, of course, she can take the book out of the library, and photocopy the pages for five or six cents each. The photocopy alternative is not as useful to the student as the scanned version on the course site, but note that Cambridge bears exactly none of the costs of making the scanned version available; Georgia State bears that cost.

Digital technologies have the capability of greatly reducing the overall social cost of making scholarly materials available to college students. Cambridge’s mission statement would seem to suggest something other than the lawsuits as a principal mode of engagement with other institutions of higher learning: “The mission of the University of Cambridge is to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.”

Things have come to a pretty pass when academic institutions sue each other over academic matters. Even if the publishers prove to be right on the merits, the lawsuit ought to be the last resort, and student use of academic materials produced by academic institutions ought be priced at something like marginal cost, rather than at the price that maximizes profit. And one wonders why three rich and distinguished institutions would go after an urban university that is much less well-resourced.

There are any number of details that will have to be worked out before we know how the mandate will be implemented, and we will probably never know the precise effect on the world of scholarly publishing. But the vote of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences makes a point that should be widely applauded in the academy. Harvard University Librarian Robert Darnton put it well in his op-ed before the faculty vote:

The motion before the FAS provides a way to realign the means of communication in a way that will favor learning. It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available through our own university repository. Instead of being the passive victims of the system, we can seize the initiative and take charge of it.

What almost all faculty care about almost all of the time is the dissemination and use of their work, not its commercial consequences. We have always known this, of course, although organizations that purport to speak for the interests of authors frequently place inordinate emphasis on authors’ commercial interests. What the Harvard faculty has done is give us all a visible and powerful affirmation that what really matters is academic work itself, and not the profitability of particular industries that have grown up around it.

Faculty time and effort, in research, writing, and reviewing, are by far the most valuable ingredients of scholarly publication, and there is enormous scope for universities and faculties to reclaim publication and the associated profits from commercial enterprises. The problem of limited, over-priced access to scholarship is a big one, and the more different ways we try to fix it, the better our chances that a few of them will work. The declaration by Harvard’s faculty focuses on one strategy — mandated (or at least default) deposit into institutional repositories. But more important than the choice of strategy, the declaration reminds us of how much is at stake and why it matters.

It is somewhat troubling that some academic publishers and academic societies have expressed concern that the Harvard mandate will put them at mortal risk, while merely trimming the profits of the big commercial publishers. Plainly, we in the academy have an interest in robust nonprofit scholarly publishing, but we should not fall for the idea that the only way for nonprofit publishing to survive is through policies that assure huge profits to the big players. (There is an analogy to agricultural policy here. In the name of preserving the “family farm,” governments around the world provide billions in subsidy to agribusiness.)

For now, let me repeat that the big news in the Harvard vote is that it helps all of us to focus on the main point — which is that scholarly publishing, through a variety of mechanisms, is first and foremost about making scholarship public, not making money. So, strange as it may sound coming from Ann Arbor: Go Crimson!