Jan Velterop wrote: > > We've always heard, from Stevan Harnad, that the author was the one who > intrinsically had copyright > on the manuscript version, so could deposit it, as an open access article, in > an open repository > irrespective of the publisher's views. If that is correct, then the author > could also attach a CC-BY > licence to the manuscript version. >
First, let's point out that Stevan always made a difference between the preprint (eventually posted before any submission, thus any copyright agreement with a publisher) and the post-peer-review manuscript (or postprint). Stevan (and others) believe that the author retains the copyright on the preprint even after having transferred the copyright on the postprint, so that the preprint may be posted or remain in the repository at any time. As to the postprint, he suggests either the posting of a corrigenda describing the changes made to the submitted version or (more recently) the use of "the email eprint request" button. See http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#self-archiving-legal The problem I've got with his interpretation is that, except in the case of a major rewriting of the article, there is not enough difference between preprint and postprint to consider them as two different works with each its own copyright owner. But I think the issue here is posting the postprint, not the preprint, so that doesn't make any difference. > > Repositories can't attach the licence, but 'gold' OA publishers can't either. > It's always the > author, as copyright holder by default. > But many publishers - even some gold OA publishers - still require transfer of copyright. In that case, they can attach any licence to the articles. And if a publisher requires a licence instead of copyright transfer (as it's more and more the case), the author, even if he or she remains the copyright holder of the published version, can't attach to it say, a CC-BY user licence, as it would most probably violate the terms of the publisher-author licence. Marc Couture _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
