In a message of 10 June 2002, Stevan Harnad commented on: >> Klaus Graf: success in attempting to re-negotiate copyright agreements >>> with publishers for themselves.... >>> ...certain publishers (eg: Nature) >>> would be extremely unwilling to review their copyright positions. > >No need to worry about re-negotiating -- or getting anyone else to >re-negotiate -- any copyright agreements in order to go ahead and open >access to the entire refereed journal literature (of 20,000+ journals and >2,000,000+ articles annually) >http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0448.html >http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0498.html
Whatever the importance of the copyright policy of journals like Nature, it may be of interest to readers of this list that that particular journal now seems to have changed its policy. In a news item that appeared in a Swedish paper a couple of weeks ago, Philip Campbell, Nature's editor-in-chief, is reported as saying that his journal recently decided to allow authors to retain the copyright to their articles. While the restrictions on distribution of material before publication remain in force, the dissemination of postprints is now left to the authors' discretion. If anyone has seen this new policy announced in Nature, it would be interesting to have the reference. Ingemar Bohlin _______________________________ Ingemar Bohlin Section of Science & Technology Studies Gothenburg University P.O. Box 700 405 30 Gothenburg Sweden Tel +46 31 773 44 74 Email [email protected] www.sts.gu.se
