A question for Stevan Harnad: What about the following sort of case:
Suppose the copyright assigned to the publisher permits the author to: > > > "mount your version of the article on your personal World Wide Web home > > >page and/or that of your employer's, provided that you (a) cite the Journal > > >as being the original place of publication and acknowledge XXX as the > > >copyright owner, and (b) provide an electronic link from your article to > > >the > > >Publisher's home page for the journal." And suppose the author has in fact taken advantage of this by mounting his or her version of the article either on his or her personal website or on the employer's website, complying with (a) and (b) as well. Question: Can the third party list the URl of that paper on his or her own website? It would no doubt be best if the author's employer had an OAI-compliant Eprint Archive, but the number of such employers will almost certainly be quite small for quite a long time to come, and in the interim a portal website specialized to the author's professional field would accomplish much the same thing simply by listing it along with its URL. Moreover, the generic OAI search engine could be modified to include a separate (but cross-referenced) list of all known papers (with URL) available via URL on all such websites -- or, indeed, on any websites whatever. The papers so listed and thus made available would not have the special benefits that accrues to the paper as OAI-compliant, such as identifiability and retrievability via string or keyword searches, but it would still be identifiable from its title and retrievable by its URL. Is there any legal problem with this? i.e. with a third-party website listing of papers by title and URL, where the paper is archived in accordance with the permission specified in the quoted passage above? 2nd Question: What about the case where there is no such special permission mentioned in the copyright transference? Is there any legal problem in this case? Best regards, Joseph Ransdell ransd...@door.net Professor Emeritus Dept of Philosophy Texas Tech University Lubbock, Texas 79409