[GOAL] Copyright claims on early articles in society journals

[Walker,Thomas J]

Once the Internet and the PDF format made it easy to do so, I made PDFs of all my published articles freely available on my department's server and have done so ever since.  Now 83 and emeritus, I decided it would be interesting to find out if the University of Florida could provide unrestricted access to PDF's of my journal articles in its institutional repository (IR at UF<http://ufdc.ufl.edu/ir>).  With one major exception, repository staff found few problems with posting the PDF files with a CC-BY rights statement.  That exception was 19 articles published from 1967 through 1998 in journals of the Entomological Society of America (ESA).   Of the 19 articles, 13 were published before 1978, the year when ESA began requiring its authors (other than those working for the USDA) to sign copyright agreements.



If the author of a  journal article did not sign a copyright agreement, does the publisher (ESA in this case) have the right to prohibit the author from providing open access to an author-made PDF of the article?



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Thomas J. Walker

Department of Entomology & Nematology

University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620

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