At 17:05 03/10/04 +0100, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
For part of the authors' submission - the supplemental data - it is worse.
I know that for some of this list only "full text" is published but for
many scientists the supplemental data (without which the paper is not
allowed to be published) is at least or even more important. In the
present case the publisher sends the data to a data aggregator which
releases it with the following added copyright notice (I quote part and
gently anonymise the source)
This [data] is provided on the understanding that it is used for bona
fide research purposes only. It may contain copyright material of [the
data aggregator] or of third parties, and may not be copied or further
disseminated in any form, whether machine-readable or not, except for the
purpose of generating routine backup copies on your local computer system.
Stevan has answered most of Peter's points, so I will just pick up on this
point concerning supplemental data.
A publisher or third-party cannot assume any copyright over the author's
materials other than that assigned by the author. If that assignment is
'green', then it applies to the supplemental data as well as the full text.
If Peter is concerned about 'collection of facts' issues that restrict
subsequent dissemination from commercial database services that might have
published the supplemental data based on an agreement with a journal
publisher, then the answer is to self-archive the supplemental data along
with the self-archived full text.
As Peter is aware, services that enable this are being developed
http://ecrystals.chem.soton.ac.uk/
This one is based on Eprints, and is being developed by the eBank UK project
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/ebank-uk/
It's not in general use yet, but the project has been funded for a second
year to widen support for usage in more subject areas.
Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
