Open and Shut?: Guest Post: Charles Oppenheim on who owns the rights to scholarly articles

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-02-05

Summary:

"The recent decision by Elsevier to start sending take down notices to sites like Academia.edu, and to individual universities, demanding that they remove self-archived papers from their web sites has sparked a debate about the copyright status of different versions of a scholarly paper. Last week, the Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke University in the US, Kevin Smith, published a blog post challenging a widely held assumption amongst OA advocates that when scholars transfer copyright in their papers they transfer only the final version of the article. This is not true, Smith argued. As he put it: 'Each version is a revision of the original, and the copyright is the same for all these derivatives.  When copyright is transferred to a publisher, the rights in the entire set of versions, as derivatives of one another, are included in the transfer.  Authors are not allowed to use their post-prints because the rights in that version are not covered in the transfer; they are allowed to use post-prints only because the right to do so, in specified situations, is licensed back to them as part of the publication agreement.'  If correct, this would seem to have important implications for Green OA, not least because it would mean that publishers have greater control over self-archiving than OA advocates assume. However Charles Oppenheim, a UK-based copyright specialist, believes that OA advocates are correct in thinking that when an author signs a copyright assignment only the rights in the final version of the paper are transferred, and so authors retain the rights to all earlier versions of their work, certainly under UK and EU law. As such, they are free to post earlier versions of their papers on the Web ..."

Link:

http://poynder.blogspot.com/2014/02/guest-post-charles-oppenheim-on-who.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.elsevier oa.takedowns oa.copyright oa.licensing oa.postprints oa.green oa.policies oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.repositories oa.libre oa.versions

Date tagged:

02/05/2014, 09:04

Date published:

02/05/2014, 04:04