Re: Association for Computer Machinery Copyright/Self-Archiving Policy

From: Laurent Guerby <guerby_at_ACM.ORG>
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 13:08:11 +0100

Richard Stallman wrote:
> the definitive copy in ACM's Digital Library, and (4) a notice that
> the copy is posted by permission of ACM and may not
> be redistributed. (See §2.5, §2.6 regarding CoRR, and §3.2.)
>
> This condition prohibits mirror sites, which makes it unacceptable. I
> hope authors will reject this condition.

 From the CoRR FAQ:

<<
What about copyright?

Submission to the repository does not require a transfer of copyright.
Authors will continue to retain copyright when they submit (although
they may have to transfer rights if they wish to publish in certain
journals).
>>

My reading is that you can always submit your own preprint to CoRR with
your copyright,
but may be the publication you are targetting will refuse the paper.

I encourage ACM authors to ask politely their publication policy if an
author version of the paper is on CoRR.

My understanding of the CoRR experiment is that if there is overwhelming
requests from authors to be able to post preprints freely then the
ACM will take the right position on the issue. If no author
says anything, well, who knows what will happen. ACM
holds election from time to time, for the next one be sure to ask
candidates about their position on this issue.

If you know someone that has weight on ACM policies, please
do contact them about the CoRR experiment.

BTW, I find the whole ACM legal stuff and FAQ not very clear, I assume
it reflects
the not really clear position of ACM on this issue. Also
that the extension decision is not mentionned on any web site I know
(and not where it should be) is a bit disturbing for an issue
of such an importance.

-- 
Laurent Guerby <guerby_at_acm.org>
Received on Tue Mar 19 2002 - 12:39:00 GMT

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