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

[Chris Zielinski]

This will surely depend on on the wording of the copyright assignment
notice.

Prudent authors should only sign away the rights to the final version of
their paper (in this case, as edited and modified by Elsevier).

This was the subversiveness in the original Harnad "subversive proposal" to
post/archive the final version anyway.

But even more prudent authors simply shouldn't sign the copyright
assignment form - publishers don't need anything more than a licence to
publish.

Chris
Chris Zielinski


On 4 February 2014 13:17, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder at btinternet.com>wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> Charles Oppenheim explains his thinking here:
> http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/guest-post-charles-oppenheim-on-who.html
>
>
>
> Richard Poynder
>
>
>
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