[GOAL] Re: Copyright claims on early articles in society journals

[Paul Royster]

No. If copyright was not transferred by contract or agreement, the publisher has no claim or basis to prevent the author's re-use or redistribution (in the USA).

There is no separate claim or rights on the publisher-produced printed edition or pdf. Copyright applies only to content, not to formatting.

It does not matter who made the pdf, either. That is a mechanical process, devoid of the creative act required for copyright.

Paul Royster
Scholarly Communications, UNL Libraries
306 Love Library
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
402 472-3628
proyster at unl.edu<mailto:proyster at unl.edu>
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu<http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/>

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Walker,Thomas J
Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2015 12:09 PM
To: GOAL at eprints.org
Subject: [GOAL] Copyright claims on early articles in society journals


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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