> Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 13:56:49 +0000
> From: ALPSP <[log in to unmask]>
> Sally Morris, Secretary-General Association of Learned and
> Professional Society Publishers
>
> After considerable helpful discussion with members of its Copyright
> Committee and others, ALPSP (the Association of Learned and
> Professional Society Publishers) <www.alpsp.org.uk> has come up
> with a model 'Grant of Licence' form for journal articles...
>
> Licence to Publish
>
> ...Copyright remains yours, and we will acknowledge this in the
> copyright line which appears on your article. However, you
> authorise us to act on your behalf to defend your copyright if
> anyone should infringe it, and to retain half of any damages
> awarded, after deducting our costs. YOU ALSO RETAIN THE RIGHT TO
> USE YOUR OWN ARTICLE (provided you acknowledge the published
> original in standard bibliographic citation form) as follows, as
> long as you do not sell it [or give it away] in ways which would
> conflict directly with our commercial business interests: for the
> internal educational or other purposes of your own institution or
> company; MOUNTED ON YOUR OWN OR YOUR INSTITUTION'S WEBSITE; [POSTED
> TO FREE PUBLIC SERVERS OF PREPRINTS AND/OR ARTICLES IN YOUR SUBJECT
> AREA]; in whole or in part, as the basis for your own further
> publications or spoken presentations.
Please contrast the ALPSP's progressive copyright policy, entirely in
harmony with the interests of research and research authors in the new
online medium, with the following policy:
> ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC. TRANSFER OF COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT
>
> Rights of Authors
>
> Elsevier Science Inc recognizes the retention of the following rights
> by the author(s):
>
> 1. Patent and trademark rights and rights to any process or
> procedure described in the article.
>
> 2. The right to photocopy or make single electronic copies of the
> article for their own personal use, including for their own
> classroom use, or for the personal use of colleagues, provided the
> copies are not offered for sale and are not distributed in a
> systematic way outside of their employing institution (e.g. via an
> e-mail list or public file server). Posting of the article on a
> secure network (not accessible to the public) within the author's
> institution is permitted. However, IF A PRIOR VERSION OF THIS WORK
> (NORMALLY A PREPRINT) HAS BEEN POSTED TO AN ELECTRONIC PUBLIC
> SERVER, THE AUTHOR(S) AGREE NOT TO UPDATE AND/OR REPLACE THIS
> PRIOR VERSION ON THE SERVER IN ORDER TO MAKE IT IDENTICAL IN
> CONTENT TO THE FINAL PUBLISHED VERSION, AND FURTHER THAT POSTING
> OF THE ARTICLE AS PUBLISHED ON A PUBLIC SERVER CAN ONLY BE DONE
> WITH ELSEVIER'S WRITTEN PERMISSION.
>
> 3. The right, subsequent to publication, to use the article or any
> part thereof free of charge in a printed compilation of works of
> their own, such as collected writings or lecture notes, in a
> thesis, or to expand the article into book-length form for
> publication.
To resolve this profound conflict of interest, on which so much potential
benefit to research and researchers hinges, I recommend the following:
[excerpted from "Free at Last: The Future of
Peer-Reviewed Journals" D-Lib Magazine Volume 5 Number 12
December 1999
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html]
"So authors should transfer to their publishers all the rights
to sell their papers, in paper or online, but they should
retain the right to self-archive them online for free for
all. Many publishers will agree (the American Physical
Society <ftp://aps.org/pub/jrnls/copy_trnsfr.asc> being a
model in this respect) because their scholarly/scientific
goals are in harmony with those of their authors and readers.
"But with those publishers whose copyright agreement
explicitly forbids the public self-archiving of the
peer-reviewed final draft, the solution is to self-archive
the preprint at the time it is first submitted for
publication, and then once it is accepted, simply to archive
a list of the changes that went into the revised final draft;
alternatively, a further revised, enhanced draft, going
substantively beyond the accepted, final draft, with a fuller
reference list, Hyperlinks, more data and figures added,
etc., can be self-archived, together with a list of what in
this new edition was not in the final accepted draft. Either
way, the handwriting (or rather the skywriting) is on the
wall.
"This gets around copyright restrictions (note that analogies
with online piracy of text, music and software are irrelevant
because we are speaking of "self-piracy" here).
"A further potential obstacle is an embargo policy like the one
the New England Journal of Medicine
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0019.html practises under the name of the "Ingelfinger Rule"
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0020.html
and that journals like Science
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/285/5425/197#EL12
likewise practise.
"I don't think I need to spell out for Web-savvy authors how
easily arbitrary and self-serving policies like this can be
gotten around by suitable cosmetic measures on one's
self-archived preprint. In any case, I doubt that journal editors
and referees (who, after all, are us), will long collaborate with
policies that are no longer either justified or necessary, being
now so clearly designed solely in the interest of protecting
current S/L/P revenue streams rather than in the interest of
disseminating research. Besides, journal embargo policies, unlike
copyright agreements, are not even legal matters..."
See also: <http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/help/copyright.html>
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad [log in to unmask]
Professor of Cognitive Science [log in to unmask]
Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582
Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865
University of Southampton http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of "Freeing the
Refereed Journal Literature Through Online Self-Archiving" is available
at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html
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