It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to reflect on the analogy that Professor Mattlage draws between the publishing of scholarly articles in journals that require the authors to relinquish copyrights and the sale of kidneys, corneas, and other pieces of one's embodied person.1 Mattlage uses Stanford University Law Professor Margaret Jane Radin's notion of personal property2 to elaborate the issues involved in the sale of items that Professor Radin suggests are only loosely regarded as property. These items are parts or elements in our embodied personhood and thus they should never be coercively alienated or separated from us. Moreover, these items are not commensurable with money. Although to Radin and Mattlage, the impropriety of selling body parts is evident and not seriously questioned, arguments need to be provided, especially when the deal involves a contract that meets the usual conditions for validity.One does have weird and uncomfortable feelings when confronted with tables that accident insurance policies provide for lost limbs and parts of limbs: $5,000 for a hand, $25,000 for an entire leg, $3,000 for a toe, $12,500 for an entire foot, etc. So, perhaps putting a monetary value on limbs is a bit arbitrary and morally suspect. Still, the loss of a toe does indeed pale in compari- son with the loss of an entire leg and for a policy to pay the same regardless of the centrality of the lost part to a person's natural life does not seem to represent moral progress.Consider the following organ selling hypothetical that seems somewhat analogous to scholarly publishing. Horace has lost the use of his left eye due to a disease of his retina. His cornea is fine and of no use to Horace whatever. Horace puts it up for sale on eBay and receives many bids. He has each bidder write an essay on why he should accept his or her bid. He then selects one of the bidders and the medical arrangements are made. The bidder gets the cornea that Horace no longer needs, Horace gets the price the bidder offered, eBay takes its cut, and everyone is better off.The case of Horace is clearly distinguishable from the usual sale of body parts. The familiar cases are indeed morally disgusting because they place significant and new bodily limitations on the sellers. In the hypothetical just described, Horace is already limited and the sale of his body part produces no new limitation. Rather, it is a way for Horace to be compensated for sharing a part he no longer needs. A similar idea underlies organ donor cards on driver's licenses. Once the driver is dead, he or she no longer needs any body organs and since these organs can be harvested to help others, social structures are arranged to make this happen. There is no obvious principled reason why dead organ donors' estates should not be modestly compensated for the donation. The compensation should be modest so as to keep the incentive for organ donation non-coercive.For the sake of considering Mattlage's argument, let us take it as a given or boundary condition, that it is a serious moral wrong for any human to be coerced into selling any body parts, especially those that are irreplaceable. Mattlage's central claim is that there are interesting structural similarities between the coercive sale of body parts and the academic pressure to publish in elite journals. These journals are more and more owned and published by international conglomerates that require authors to relinquish copyright privileges. Mattlage sees this relinquishing of copyright as importantly analogous to the separation of an element of embodied personhood from the integral body.Discussing Mattlage's thesis with colleagues and students has been most constructive and enlightening. …