[Dspace-general] metadata: source and creator

[JQ Johnson]

One additional point to follow up on Goodman's survey of different meanings
of "contributor" and "creator":  an almost orthogonal set of meanings comes
from copyright law, where the law and associated case law establish the
"author" of an "original work of authorship" for legal purposes.  We often
tend to confuse author in this sense with author in the scholarly sense,
particularly when we are trying to assign values to things like
contributor.author, since the qualified name suggests that it ought to have
something to do with the copyright notion.  Copyright law also makes
occasional reference to "creation" and more frequent reference to
"contributor".

The two notions are, however, quite different.  For copyright purposes under
US law, the "author" of a work such as a joint-authored scholarly paper is
probably all of the people who actually contributed expression (i.e. people
who wrote portions of the text even if they aren't listed as authors on the
title page), but not people who contributed the ideas or who did the
experiments or who serve as PI in the lab.  Note that in US law joint
authors all own the copyright equally, any can assign rights, and all should
receive portions of any royalties.  However, this comparatively simple
notion is further complicated by "work for hire" which in turn depends on
agency law -- at many institutions a scholarly work prepared in the course
of employment is actually "authored" by the institution, not by the
individuals.  And, of course, copyright ownership (though perhaps not
"authorship") can be assigned, so the owner may not be the author.

It's all a can of worms, and one that DSpace would do well to sidestep
whenever possible.  HOWEVER, it's one we can't totally sidestep, since in
addition to having an impact on the metadata we store, it also directly
impacts our rights as an archive to accept submissions -- we need to be
confident that the works placed in our dspace archives are there
legitimately, which often means that we need to know whether the person
submitting them was a copyright owner at the time of submission.

JQ Johnson                      Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  mailto:jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax
Eugene, OR  97403-1299          http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/