On Wed, 30 May 2001, Albert Henderson wrote: > on 30 May 2001 "Peter D. Junger" <[email protected]> wrote: > > It is unusual for authors to ``transfer'' the entire copyright in an > > article to a journal. Normally all that is assigned is the right of > > first publication in a journal. > > > > Is the situation really so different in the case of scientific journals? > > I am only speaking of learned journals. Your "normally" > refers to mass media and first serial rights. Learned > journal contracts that I have seen generally transfer > the copyright "as a work made for hire" and return to > the author limited rights, for example, to use the > material in class and in a monograph of which the author > is the sole originator.
Would it not be odd, and ironic in the extreme, if the category of texts that are the most remote from being "work made for hire" -- namely, the give-away pre- and post-refereeing research reports that were most decidedly NOT written for any royalty, fee or salary in exchange for their writing -- indeed proved to be the ONLY ones vendors could hold hostage in this way? I don't believe it for a minute. Nor do I believe that, should anything like this happen to be technically true in some construal, that it would be enforceable in any way. It would only have been a glaring anomaly that no one had noticed or done anything about until now -- because in the Gutenberg Era, with the true associated expenses of on-paper production and dissemination, there was nothing that COULd have been done anyway, whereas in the PostGutenberg Era of public on-line archiving there most decidedely is... > I am saying that after the transfer of copyright, the > article must be withdrawn unless the agreement provides > for continued publication of the preprint form of the work. This is all predicated on prior PUBLICATION, where "publication" is constured to be the same sort of thing as that "secondary" publication which now calls for the withdrawal of the primary one. That's all Gutenberg gibberish. Legally, even a hand-written copy on toilet paper or a lavatory wall is "publication" (and protected by copyright); so is a radio reading, which can be taped by countless listeners. What on earth would the author's obligation to "withdraw" all of that from the ether amount to? Well exactly the same is true of preprint archiving. Once it is in the bowels of the Internet -- mirrored, cached, downloaded, etc., all over the planet, there is not a power under the PostGutenberg sun that could have withdrawn it. So forget about "liability" once the cybercat is out of the bag. Try writing a law to enforce the unenforceable, indeed the incoherent. No, this is Gutenberg gibberish being naively (but mischievously) invoked in a PostGutenberg age to which it no longer has any relevance or applicability. Albert is merely relying upon (and encouraging) the sluggishness of our generation's minds and habits, to retard the inevitable and unstoppable descent of the token, to the eternal advantage of research and humanity, if not certain vendors' traditional revenue streams. > The claims, as I read them, that the preprint is somehow > different than the work affected by the copyright transfer, > are unrealistic if not downright misleading. They remind > me of the folks who argue that 5th amendment protections > against self-incrimination support not filing tax returns ... Think again. Try reconstruing it instead as applying to (say) the retroactive erasure of all copies of notes taken at the scientific conference where these "written-for-hire" results were first reported. (Polemical images cut both ways.) > My impression, that the owner of the Internet server > may be liable, refers to the period following the > transfer of copyright and notice to the server. Continuing > to publish is a act of contributory infringment. Moot, once it's out in the ether. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad [email protected] Professor of Cognitive Science [email protected] Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: [email protected]
