INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: Who Should Own Scientific Papers? Bachrach et al. Science 1998 September 4: 1459-1460
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/5382/1459 EDITORIAL: The Rightness of Copyright. Bloom, F. Science 1998 September 4: 1451. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/281/5382/1451 On Fri, 4 Sep 1998 17:24:34 -0400, Mark Doyle <do...@aps.org> wrote: >There are two approaches to copyright: The first is that the author cedes >it to someone else who can then turn around an immediately grant back to the >author many rights (as the APS currently does). The other is for the author >to retain the copyright and just turn over a limited portion of the rights >to a publisher (as argued in the Science article). Actually at this point it's useful to look at the legal definitions associated with copyright: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/101.shtml In particular, any exclusive license, which I believe is required for publishers to cover costs (through reader payments - ie. S/SL/PPV) as well as to avoid duplication issues most scientific publications are leary of (the same paper published in Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters?) is viewed legally as a "transfer of copyright ownership". But it does not have to be a transfer of ALL the rights associated with copyright. These rights are summarized in section 106 of the law, and can be owned separately, or each one partially owned (with various conditions etc) by separate parties. The one right that publishers will most likely need exclusively (at least in part) is (3), "to distribute copies [...] to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending." ie. the right to sell copies of the work. The other rights can be granted through a license from the author without a transfer of ownership. It is also interesting to note that authors may revoke both exclusive and nonexclusive licenses 35-40 years later, and works enter the public domain generally after 75 years (or 50 years after the death of the author, if the author's life or death status has been registered with the copyright office) Anyway, the article in Science by the "Transition from Paper" group recommended a "nonexclusive license" which does not constitute transfer of any of the rights associated with copyright. I think there are a lot of potential dangers in going this far, and not just to the publishers. Let's just imagine a world where publishers had no legal means to prevent, and no monetary compensation for, duplicate publication by authors, or third parties publishing subsets ("The Best of ..."), duplicates, or supersets of articles from well-known journals. Is this what the authors of the article in question wanted? Perhaps members of the "transition from paper" group can respond on exactly what they meant? I think there is an optimal copyright position for both author and publisher where most of the rights are retained by the author. Some publishers may want more restrictive agreements, some less, and of course it will be up to authors to decide what they are willing to live with. But government mandates on the issue are unlikely to be helpful. Arthur Smith <apsm...@aps.org>