Martin Blume, Editor in Chief, American Physical Society: The issue that has been raised in the "Transition from Paper" article (Bachrach et al., 1998) is really the right of an author to be free from restraints in circulating his/her ideas. Keeping copyright is just one way of accomplishing this, but it's not the only one. The signatories of the paper believe that an author should not be penalized and should be free to announce results in advance of publishing, to post or update articles on an eprint server, to circulate an article from a web page, and to distribute reprints electronically or otherwise. Since many publishers, Science included (Bloom 1998), prohibit one or another of these desireable "rights" we have put forward copyright retention for consideration as a solution. The central issues are in my view the rights and not merely copyright.
The American Physical Society, of which I am Editor-in-Chief, recognizes those rights explicitly in its copyright form. The author transfers copyright to the Society, but retains the rights enumerated above. The reverse situation, where the author retains copyright but gives a license to the publisher, would be acceptable to us if the license were sufficiently broad to allow us to do, in future, whatever we want to do with the article. We have just put on line all of Physical Review back to 1985 (100,000 articles!), and expect eventually to go back to 1893. We would not have been able to do this if we had a license to publish these earlier works but no mention had been made in that license of electronic distribution. We need to be able to do the unforeseen as well as the foreseen in order to assure the widest possible distribution of the information, which is ultimately the goal of any scholarly publisher. This must be done while we, at the same time, recover our costs for added value. We have to date managed to do this, but must be imaginative in the future as the world changes. One further point that has been introduced into the discussion is the idea that a copyright holder is more likely than a licensee to pursue plagiarists. I do not believe this. Plagiarism is not prosecuted because it is a copyright violation. Any learned society would pursue plagiarists because plagiarism is grossly unethical and strikes at the heart of the scholarly process. Martin Blume <bl...@bnl.gov> Editor in Chief American Physical Society ----------------------------------------------------------------------- REFERENCES Bachrach, S., Berry, S.R., Blume, M., von Foerster, T., Fowler, A., Ginsparg, P., Heller, S., Kestner, N., Odlyzko, A., Okerson, A., Wigington, R., & Moffat, A. (1998) Intellectual Property: Who Should Own Scientific Papers? Science 281 (5382): 1459-1460. September 4 1998 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/5382/1459 Bloom, F. (1998) Editorial: The Rightness of Copyright. Science 281 (5382): 1451. September 4 1998 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/281/5382/1451