While Jeffrey Beale may find it acceptable, moral and simple to assign his copyrights to a publisher simply for the benefit of being published, I find it an intolerable demand and while I do sign such in order to facilitate my career and to gain the benefits of dissemination in the best journal for my work I find the consequences appalling.
Here is a real example of the consequences. For a paper I and two others wrote, I created a diagram showing our expression of a well-known but variously exressed concept (the uchi-soto model of Japanese social interaction). As part of their further work my two co-authors wrote another article which used the same concept and wished to re-use the diagram I'd created. I was quite happy that they do so since although I had created the diagram my understanding of the concept had been developed from their teaching - I was simply better able to use graphic design tools to render it simple to understand. Because we'd had to sign a copyright transfer in order to get the original article published somewhere suitable (we went through three journals before finally finding one for which the topic fit the aims and objectives) we had to go back to the publisher and get permission to use re-use the diagram. Even if it had been me, I would have had to go through the same process. No other publisher would accept the article reproducing the diagram without a copyright permission form from the publisher of the first article. I find this a ridiculous situation and contrary to the ideals of the development of scholarship. Having learned from this, I now plan to release all graphics I create that I might use in an article, under a CC-BY license before submission. I'd like to release it under CC-BY-SA because I'm a believer in copyleft, but that would prevent me from using it in articles where the publisher requires me to asign copyright in the article, and where they won't release the article CC-BY-SA themselves. (While it's possible that a publisher could then refuse to publish an article using that diagram, I think it's unlikely - I don't work in a field where the diagrams are a huge part of the value of the article - I understand that is not the case universally. They could require me to take down my original copy from my website as part of the agreement to publish, but I could just make sure that someone else was still making a copy available and I would have no ability to prevent that spreading. I have gone through a similar issue with a book publisher. I released a set of lecture slides under a CC license while writing a textbook on the topic. The publisher wanted slides and I offered these, but pointed out that they were already available, and had been for about a year, under a CC license, so while I could transfer copyright in the slides to them - that's what they demanded - it would be pointless since even I myself could still use them under the original CC release. After some internal discussion they released them on their website under the same CC license I'd used - CC-BY-NC, which I later realised is the wrong license and I now use CC-BY-SA where I can and CC-By where I can't require SA.) -- Professor Andrew A Adams [email protected] Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
