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

[Couture Marc]

Sally Morris wrote:

>
When Cox & Cox last looked into this (in 2008), 53% of publishers requested a copyright transfer, 20.8% asked for a licence to publish instead, and 6.6% did not require any written agreement.
>

These figures don't mean much by themselves. When an exclusive licence is used, the author may actually end up with less permissions than what many copyright transfer agreements allow. Unfortunately, as Cox & Cox report isn't freely available, I don't know if they distinguished exclusive and non-exclusive licences.

In a more recent paper (2013), one of the Coxes, commenting the above mentioned study, makes it clear:

http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2333&context=atg 

"Who owns the copyright is much less important than what the author can do with his or her own work."

I found in that short paper another interesting statement, quite well-founded if one remembers the discussions on this list about abstruse or incoherent information on many publisher websites.

"Publishers have been negligent in making clear to their authors how their copyright policies operate in practise."

Well, some (including me, after having recently tried to decipher, not to say to simply find, the copyright section in some publisher websites) are tempted to see more than negligence there.

Marc Couture