>> No. Someone is (passively) failing to provide free access to their own >> contributions to those journals, and that someone is the author of each >> and every article appearing therein (with the exception of a growing >> number of physicists and a few other disciplines at last beginning to do >> the right thing!).
On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Richard Stallman wrote: > I would like to believe this, but my imperfect memory of the > publication contract I got from CACM seems to say that authors are not > allowed to do this if they sign such contracts. (That is part of the > reason I always insist on renegotiating them.) Here are some excerpts from the BOAI self-archiving faq that describe what to do in such cases: What about copyright? http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#copyright1 The author holds the copyright for the pre-refereeing preprint, so that can be self-archived without seeking anyone else's permission. For the refereed postprint, the author can try to modify the copyright transfer agreement to allow self-archiving, or, failing that, can append or link a corrigenda file http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#6.5 to the already self-archived preprint. See " Is self-archiving legal? " http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#self-archiving-legal and "What if the publisher forbids self-archiving the preprint? " http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publisher-forbids Is self-archiving legal? http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#self-archiving-legal Texts that an author has himself written are his own intellectual property. The author holds the copyright and is free to give away or sell copies, on-paper or on-line (e.g., by self-archiving), as he sees fit. For example, the pre-refereeing preprint can always be legally self-archived . http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0541.html Self-archiving of one's own, non-plagiarized texts is in general legal in all cases but two. The first of these two exceptions is irrelevant to the kind of self-archiving BOAI is concerned with, and for the second there is a legal alternative. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml Exception 1: Where exclusive copyright in a "work for hire" has been assigned by the author to a publisher -- i.e., the author has been paid (or will be paid royalties) in exchange for the text -- the author may not self-archive it. The text is still the author's "intellectual property," in the sense that authorship is retained by the author, and the text may not be plagiarized by anyone, but the exclusive right to sell or give away copies of it has been transfered to the publisher. Exception 1 is irrelevant to BOAI , because BOAI is concerned only with peer-reviewed research, for which the author is paid nothing, and no royalty revenue is expected, sought, or paid. Exception 2: Where exclusive copyright has been assigned by the author to a journal publisher for a peer-reviewed draft, refereed and accepted for publication by that journal, then that draft may not be self-archived by the author (without the publisher's permission). The pre-refereeing preprint, however, has already been (legally) self-archived. (No copyright transfer agreement existed at that time.) So in those cases where the publisher does not agree to modify the copyright transfer agreement so as to allow the self-archiving of the refereed final draft ("postprint"), a corrigenda file can instead be self-archived, alongside the already archived preprint, listing the changes that need to be made to make the pre-refereeing preprint conform to the refereed postprint. What if the publisher forbids preprint self-archiving? http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publisher-forbids The right to self-archive the refereed postprint is a legal matter, because the copyright transfer agreement pertains to that text. But the pre-refereeing preprint is self-archived at a time when no copyright transfer agreement exists and the author holds exclusive and full copyright. So publisher policy forbidding prior self-archiving of preprints is never a legal matter, but merely a journal policy matter (as it would be if the journal were to forbid the submission of papers by authors with blue-eyed uncles!). http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/17/01/index.html This policy goes by the name of the " Ingelfinger Rule ," originally invoked by the Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Franz Ingelfinger, in order to protect public health (and the NEJM's priority) from any publicity about unrefereed findings prior to publication. http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/17/03/index.html The Ingelfinger Rule (sometimes also referred to as a " prepublication embargo ") is accordingly not a copyright matter, but a journal submission policy: "We will not consider for publication any preprint that has been previously self-archived." http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0496.html BOAI makes no recommendations to authors regarding compliance with such policies, except to note that (1) the Ingelfinger Rule is not a legal matter, (2) the number of journals invoking the Ingelfinger Rule is rapidly diminishing in the face of self-archiving pressure from authors in the interests of research progress (Nature, for example, has dropped it, http://www.nature.com/nature/author/embargo.html and other journals are following suit) and (3) the Ingelfinger Rule was probably never enforceable in any case. See also: 6. How to get around restrictive copyright legally http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#Harnad/Oppenheim Stevan Harnad 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 or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm