[GOAL] Re: Charles Oppenheim on who owns the rights to scholarly articles

Steven Harnad is quite correct that in a majority of publication agreements, the publisher receives exclusive rights either by assignment or by exclusive license and then grants back to the author the non-exclusive rights to post some earlier version of the article. And, he is quite correct that not enough authors exercise the rights they have under their existing publication agreements. He is also right that they may (and should!) deposit copies of their final manuscripts in institutional or disciplinary repositories because the act of deposit is covered by the exceptions and limitations to copyright ­ such as fair use or fair dealing ­ in a substantial number of countries around the world.