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Re: Deadline extended for proposals for STC Annual Conference

Subject: Re: Deadline extended for proposals for STC Annual Conference
From: Geoffrey Sauer <gsauer -at- iastate -dot- edu>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 09:28:33 -0500


Hi all,

Dood writes:

Right, but in most cases the presenters at these conferences are paid
for their contributions, in which case the transfer of copyright is
the result of a financial transaction (the conference purchases the
intellectual rights). This is not the case with the STC, which bothers
me.

What concerns me is not the conspiracy of STC garnering distribution rights to papers for no recompense (I'm an academic, and that's the entire world of academic publishing -- don't get me started), but rather the peculiar way in which the STC manages these properties.

They sell past proceedings (the collected papers in PDF form on CD-ROM) at:

http://www.stc.org/proceedings.asp

(The STC website seems down right now, but this URL worked for me yesterday, as I was considering writing this note, and will probably work for you by the time you read this.)

But they also publish all the files for free on the stc.org website. They don't link to or index the files in any way, and you can't use their search engine to find them. But if you could divine the folder structure of the STC website, you would find all the PDF files, logically organized, and available to anyone who enters the correct URL.

It basically follows the format:

http://www.stc.org/confproceed/YEAR_DESIRED/PDFs/stc-SEQUENTIAL_NUMBERS.pdf

or sometimes:

http://www.stc.org/confproceed/YEAR_DESIRED/PDFs/PGSEQUENTIAL_NUMBERS.pdf

The group I work with at the TC Library decided in 2001 to create an index of all these files manually, entering metadata for each into our database and writing abstracts for each. We have so far (three years later) indexed just over 1,333 PDF files from STC International presentations, from 1994 to the present. We have about 500 more to go, in our 'to do' list, inside 'Habitués'. All kept on the STC website, just not linked to from any of their pages or search engine. (See http://tc.eserver.org/publishers/STC_Proceedings if you don't believe me.)

As I've posted before, my concern is not that the STC is excellent in giving all these materials away for free (which they would need at least nonexclusive electronic distribution rights to do), nor evil in seizing exclusive copyrights and then charging people for CD-ROM versions of papers they got for free, but instead just rather very awkward, trying to do both, and doing neither very well.

One of the questions the STC Transformation process is trying to address is, how _should_ this be managed? (Given that STC is in a budget crisis, and isn't going to be able to start paying for IP it's always had free in the past.)

If you were running things, how would you restructure the system?

The current tendency seems to be to try to generate revenue wherever possible, but it may be possible to argue they should do something else, if we can make a reasonable case.

Any suggestions?

--Geoff
--

............................................................
geoffrey sauer . assistant professor . iowa state university
director, the eserver . http://eserver.org/
office 515.294.3085 . cell 515.441.1461

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References:
Re: Deadline extended for proposals for STC Annual Conference: From: TechComm Dood

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