In Higher Ed Some Intellectual Property Counts More Than Others

"The draft statement [from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)] makes no mention of the scholarly output that is routinely and at no cost handed over to publishers, as faculty typically sign away their rights and their institutions could not care less about it (except the librarians). Are scholarly publications some form of third-rate intellectual property not worthy of institutional ownership protections? It leads me to conclude that this is about money. Faculty and administrators demonstrate little concern over rights to journal articles and scholarly publications because they have no way to monetize the content. They’ve allowed the publishers to corner that market. In the absence of revenue-producing prospects, it’s apparent that principles count for little when it comes to certain kinds of intellectual property. What if that changed? What if faculty and institutions could suddenly earn profits from journal articles? How would the attitude change toward intellectual property that faculty willingly hand over year after year to publishers if it could suddenly contribute to the bottom line at colleges and universities? ...Imagine if colleges and universities required faculty to turn over all their publications for inclusion in a pay-per-use system that was controlled by the institutions. An outlandish suggestion, perhaps, that defies current hopes for an entirely open access system, but what else is working? I suspect that faculty, if they saw university administrations making money off their scholarly production, would experience a change of heart on retaining the rights to this intellectual property. This introduces a revenue-earning incentive the current system lacks. There is a marketplace of sorts for faculty scholarship, but the coin of the realm isn’t money. It’s prestige. That prestige can be used to earn tenure, promotions, invitations to give talks, and may be the ticket to a better job. The current broken scholarly publishing system, funded largely by academic libraries, supports this marketplace and keeps it operating...."