> I negotiated with Elsevier when my article was accepted by one of their jo= > urnals. My refusal to assign copyright was at the time a matter of princip= > le rather than any anticipation of the OA movement. So issues of having to= > later negotiate permission to self-archive never arose. > > In the case of Kluwer, my approach has been to print out its copyright assi= > gnment form, sign it and post it back to them, but only AFTER I had deleted= > the words "I assign copyright" and replaced it with "I grant you a licence= > to print" or similar. They never complained, and always published the wor= > k; in contract law (UK law at least and I suspect the rest of the world), m= > y revised contract was the one that applied. I suspect they never noticed = > the change in wording, but that's their problem, not mine. I commend that a= > pproach.
According to my legal training it's not a valid contract. The publisher could quite easily repudiate it. Whether they'd be liable to some of it provisions is a question that could only be settled by a court case, but the usual definition of a contract requires both parties to be aware of (and in the case of employees to be authorised to commit to) the final version. The fact that the author never actually receives anything signed by the publisher in the case of academic journal publications is just one of the reasons I'm actually of the opinion that all of these so-called contracts are very dodgy. When I published a book with Wiley, for example, we went round a couple of times on the proposed contract and the one that7s valid has been signed by both parties and both parties have signed copies which match. I've never received anything signed by a publisher, and hence the "contract" in which I assign copyright to them is suspicious to me as valid in court. Of course there are in certain legal jurisdictions customary contracts and verbal contracts, but again these all assume that everyone involved have a common understanding of what they're agreeing to. Not trying to continue with any personal disharmony between myself and Charles but I find his approach to be equally fraught with potential legal and ethical issues as my own. The fig-leaf of returning an amended form which the recipient could well claim it expects only to receive as signed if unamended strikes me as equally problematic as ignoring unreasonable provisions in the first place, when one's expectation is that the other party is blissfully unaware of the changes made. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/
