This information is slightly out of date - Copyright in the US no longer has to be registered (although many people still recommend registration as an additional safeguard)
Sally NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS - PLEASE UPDATE YOUR RECORDS. THANKS! Sally Morris, Chief Executive Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK Phone: +44 (0)1903 871686 Fax: +44 (0)1903 871457 E-mail: chief-e...@alpsp.org ALPSP Website http://www.alpsp.org Our journal, Learned Publishing, is included in the ALPSP Learned Journals Collection, www.alpsp-collection.org ----- Original Message ----- From: "Fytton Rowland" <j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk> To: <american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org> Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 2:05 PM Subject: Re: Open Access Does Not require Republishing and Reprinting Rights > Copyright is, I believe, significantly different in the UK and the USA. In > the UK, as Iain says, copyright exists as soon as a text is written by its > author, whether it is published or not. In the USA, copyright has to be > registered. In Europe there are moral rights (such as the right to be > identified as the author of your work) which remain with the author even if > the copyright is transferred to another. > > If something has been placed in the public domain, anyone may use it for any > purpose whatsoever without reference to the author. Academic authors who > favour Open Access are definitionally happy for anyone to read, download and > print off their scholarly papers free of charge. However, I for one would > be unhappy if a publisher were to take one of my (free) papers off the WWW > and include it in a collection of some sort which is then sold, without any > reference to me. I would not necessarily want any money but I'd like to be > asked! So I think authors are well advised to assert copyright in their > material even if they intend to allow unlimited free access to it. > > Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University, UK
