Senior Writer The Chronicle of Higher Education

tion, such as the Internet and the computer software used with it, continued to evolve rapidly and dramatically in 1998, creating new tensions and controversies in scientific publishing and breathing new life into older issues. Copyright Ownership Copyright was a recurring theme. Increas-ingly, scholars are suggesting that the wide availability of electronic communication demands that the traditional system of handling copyright of scholarly papers be rethought. In the 4 September issue of Science, 12 scholars published an essay calling for the federal government to take steps to loosen publishers ’ control of the articles that they publish (1). The scholars said that the fed-eral government should encourage or even require scientists that receive federal grants to refuse to surrender copyright of their papers to academic journals. Instead, the scholars said, authors should give journals a license to publish their papers. That would leave authors free to post their papers on the World Wide Web or to disseminate them by other means. Journal editors said that such a change would wreak havoc with authors who need to get permission to reprint articles and would make it difficult for pub-lishers to develop new information products that would incorporate journal articles. There was little indication that federal agencies would act on the suggestion. For example, Rita Colwell, the new director of the National Science Foundation, ducked the question when asked about the pro-posal at a gathering of science journalists in Washington shortly after the essay was published. However, some universities might take the issue into their own hands. Steven E Koonin, provost of the California Insti-tute of Technology, proposed that Caltech and its faculty authors jointly retain the copyright to papers submitted to journals. The university would have enough clout to force journal publishers to accede, says Mr Koonin. But some object that, under Mr Koonin’s proposal, faculty authors would simply be trading one overlord for another. Caltech faculty were scheduled to debate the proposal in a private online forum throug