Re: Inventory of Publishers' Copyright Policies?

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 21:08:26 +0100

On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, Pauline Simpson wrote:

> many scientists have asked what individual publishers'
> agreements do allow and whether it is worth making a summary...
> Has the eprint community done this as an exercise yet?

I don't know of such an inventory (perhaps someone else does); it
would certainly be useful.

(It would also have to be constantly updated, as policies are evolving
fast, as the first unreflective, over-restrictive and unenforceable
positions are superseded by more sensible and realistic ones
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/copyright.html )

> current AGU policies http://www.agu.org/pubs/cprt_top.html
> appear to explicitly allow authors to distribute papers or parts of
> them through their institution or personal web sites.

AGU sounds sensible about the archiving of the most important thing: the
refereed, published postprints. But it is still silly in its adherence
to its own version of the "Ingelfinger Rule" for unrefereed preprints:

    "Electronic posting of preprints to services that provide or purport
    to provide archiving and citability constitutes publication. If the
    preprint is removed from the archive, it is no longer considered
    published."
    http://www.agu.org/pubs/dualpub_policy.html

This means AGU will not referee or publish papers that have been
self-archived as preprints -- until/unless the author "unpublishes" them
by removing them from the eprint archive!

I find the notion of "unpublishing" intriguing, don't you?

(What absurd knots we must tie ourselves into when we try to keep using
obsolete Gutenberg categories in the PostGutenberg age...)

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.lancet.htm

> I am now ready to put up the SOC Trial eprint archive and certainly the
> scientists want to see evidence of their submissions. Should I be waiting
> for eprints2 ?

I'm not sure what you mean. I think for actual archiving you should put
up the current official release. The pre-beta upgrades should only be
used to experiment with until eprints.org announces their official
release.
Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT

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