Christopher D. Green writes > Stevan Harnad wrote: > > > Please note that you are now asking about embargo POLICY, not copyright > > LAW, and embargo policy has no legal status. It is merely a practice > > that a journal may or may not adopt, and may or may not follow (such > > as not accepting articles in Spanish or on Experimental Oenology). > > This is a fine distinction in principle, but in practice it makes no > difference for people who must attempt to publish
... Could not agree more. At the end of the day, each author has a choice to make between getting published and surrender copyright, or not getting published and continue to have the right to self-archive. For journals, that is a tough choice. But it is a different matter for conference proceedings. The prestige from giving a paper at a conference comes from presenting it there. It does not really come from having the paper included in the conference proceedings. I have just written to the organisers of ECDL2000 http://www.bn.pt/org/agenda/ecdl2000/ that I and my co-authors will not surrender the copyright to our paper http://openlib.org/home/krichel/phoenix.html to Springer for inclusion in the proceedings. I presume that I will still be able to present the paper. It will simply not appear in the conference proceedings, which I consider to be a minor inconvenience. Has anybody here stories to share about copyright surrender refusal? Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel