Who Owns Academic Work?

“McSherry is concerned with the future of intellectual property at a time when universities continue to combine a place in the market economy with their traditional role in a gift economy. Her second worry is the flip side: what will be the effect on universities as our standards and definitions of intellectual property change, especially given the way the public domain is eroding?… The book provokes much thought about issues that most academic scientists likely do not consider in much depth—copyright, patent and data ownership, and the ‘work-for-hire’ exclusion of individual employee’s rights in the US… McSherry ably demonstrates that universities are going through a second revolution. Academics should be wary of what that revolution may bring.”—Steven M. Bachrach, New Scientist

“This book provides not a legal but a cultural analysis of the social production of academic knowledge… [McSherry] forces us to look at the data stream of modern society that passes through a series of institutions, all of which attempt to enforce conflicting ownership claims. When a professor delivers a lecture to students, is he or she making a ‘gift’ to the world in general? Or to the community of students concerned? Or does the professor retain the ownership of everything in the lecture?… This is a highly stimulating work.”—Anthony Smith, Times Higher Education Supplement

“This collection of essays…asks us to consider who has the legal and social right to academic freedom in theory and practice, and what conditions are put in place to limit or enable that freedom to exist. This is a collection of essays about the limitations of academic freedom, but it is equally a collection about the social nature of the university… The collection does what it sets out to do: provoke the reader into participating in this important ongoing dialogue… Anyone working in academia, in any capacity, should think about these issues and enter into the critical dialogue of which these texts are a part, thus ensuring we put theory into practice.”—Batia Boe Stolar, Canadian Literature

“Corynne McSherry makes a compelling argument about the ways intellectual property debates figure in the university today. Who Owns Academic Work? is at once one of the most important recent books on the contemporary university and one of the most interesting on intellectual property issues as well.”—Mark Rose, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Who Owns Academic Work? is required reading for anyone interested in the peculiar author-function of academics, and in the ways it both resembles and differs from the protocols of intellectual property law. McSherry’s intellectual and empirical skills make this work both thought-provoking and informative.”—Mario Biagioli, Harvard University

“In the best tradition of cultural studies, McSherry chooses an unfamiliar object of study, approaching it from without rather than from within… What is significantly different here (and stunning) is the thesis that intellectual property has produced a crisis in the research university and that, in turn, the question of scientific research has ‘troubled’ intellectual property principles… At stake is the maintenance of a ‘community of science’ in which trust and exchange of ideas has historically characterized the climate.”—Jane Gaines, Duke University