The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Private sector and long term responsibility for scholarly work? Nonsense!
In a recent letter opposing the U.S. Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), Martin Frank writes: "Copyright is essential to protecting these works and to preserving incentives for the private sector to continue to invest in peer review, editing, publishing, and maintaining the electronic record of vetted scientific journal articles".
One issue with this sentence that I would like to highlight, for now: it is nonsense to suggest that the private sector has a meaningful role in long-term maintenance of scholarly articles.
A private sector publisher is completely within its rights to cease to exist, or change business operations, at any time. The public has no rights to ask a private sector entity to undertake a responsibility with an infinite time span. Has anyone asked publishers to undertake this role? If so, what were they thinking? This is not the traditional role of publishers, but rather the traditional role of libraries as a memory institution.
One of the benefits of the National Institutes of Health's Public Access Policy is that it moves the traditional role of the U.S. National Library of Medicine in preserving the medical research literature into the internet age, as well as sharing the burden globally through the developing PubMedCentral International network (with the UK and Canada up and running already). Academic libraries everywhere are busy ensuring the preservation of electronic collections, just as they have preserved print collections in the past (and present, of course).
For the latest on my research into the economics of transitioning scholarly works to open access, please see my research blog Sustaining the Knowledge Commons.
Heather Morrison is Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa's École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies and Principal Investigator on the SSHRC Insight Grant project Sustaining the Knowledge Commons. Heather's dissertation at Simon Fraser University School of Communication in 2012 is on Freedom for scholarship in the internet age.
If you are a learner or educator, at any level, all of the content on this blog is completely free for you to use! For details on this elaboration of the IJPE Creative Commons license, see this post: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/education-is-public-good-not-commercial.html
These are all of Zubairi's works that remain on the Poetry Pages. You can delete all of the original table of contents and create a new one. If you want to try to "organize" the poems according to the topics Z has originally set out you may try to do that, but it will be a tedious task. I'd be happy just to have a topic link list like you've been creating, but use your own judgment here. I think this one is going to take you at least three days...
I have tried to contact a radio station in Uganda that published an article mentioning Zubairi "http://radiokatwe.com/baruhazawasomi080723.htm", thanks to some great sleuthing by Gordy. I am hopeful that they will respond and I am most pleased that we have these works by him we knew as ZAN.
i also sent them an email but have not yet heard back, i also found a link to "the alumni" at the college he worked at and sent them an email as well...
Beside reading alot of the poems he posted here,.....most of them describing the trials and tribulations of living in Africa,.... and his enmity toward European intrusions there,.....Zan and I had discussed via PM's the commonalities between British
policies in Ireland,.... and Africa. I'm sorry he's no longer with us,..... but as with any good poet,...his words will germinate
in the minds of his people,... and one day cause the changes he so desparetly wanted. Rest in peace Zan.