Here in the United States are various rights one can have as a "copyright," and the people at Creative Commons spell out those differences pretty clearly on their Web site (www.creativecommons.org) for those interested. Although our authors keep the copyright, they do so under a signed agreement with us that the only right they retain is the right of proper attribution, as spelled out in the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/).=20
Rebecca Kennison Public Library of Science -----Original Message----- From: Fytton Rowland [mailto:[email protected]]=20 Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 5:05 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Open Access Does Not require Republishing and Reprinting Rights Copyright is, I believe, significantly different in the UK and the USA. In the UK, as Iain says, copyright exists as soon as a text is written by its author, whether it is published or not. In the USA, copyright has to be registered. In Europe there are moral rights (such as the right to be identified as the author of your work) which remain with the author even if the copyright is transferred to another. If something has been placed in the public domain, anyone may use it for any purpose whatsoever without reference to the author. Academic authors who favour Open Access are definitionally happy for anyone to read, download and print off their scholarly papers free of charge. However, I for one would be unhappy if a publisher were to take one of my (free) papers off the WWW and include it in a collection of some sort which is then sold, without any reference to me. I would not necessarily want any money but I'd like to be asked! So I think authors are well advised to assert copyright in their material even if they intend to allow unlimited free access to it. Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University, UK
