If we can convince our own administrators to take these factors into account and can change our professional associations from within, I think that we'd have a much better chance to garnering faculty support. The letter is a response to my request for a response to the Research Triangle copyright document which I sent him. I was interested to read the paper you sent me on copyright and the suggestion in it that authors should retain copyright and not assign it to the publisher. Nevertheless, the proposal that authors should retain copyright does make us uneasy. Moreover, it is much more difficult to rouse a whole lot of disparate authors to object or take a major purveyor to court even if there were flagrant breaches of copyright.
Publishers moreover have more resources than individuals for litigation.
This would erode the money available for legitimate peer-group review, the possibility of employing discerning editors, etc., and the needs of authors to have their photographs reproduced at high resolution. I do not think that copyright retention is the way to deal with the matter. I have just read, with some sense of bemusement, a number of items relating to the proposed Triangle libraries statement regarding copyright assignment for scholarly publications. Both assume that the copyright itself is an extremely valuable commodity which must be retained for ensuring their viability and legitimate ends. In our economy, making a profit is not a criminal offense, and customers retain the right to select the best product at the lowest cost.