[GOAL] Re: For a publisher to claim copyright, must the author sign a contract?

[Paul Royster]

In the absence of an instrument (contract, agreement, etc.) transferring copyright, your copyright was retained by you. An ex post facto resolution is not a substitute for a transfer agreement.

You retained all rights and can do whatever you desire. You do not need to comply with their requirements about linking to paywalled versions.

(Note: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I have managed publishing contracts for more than 30 years.)

Paul Royster
Coordinator of Scholarly Communications
University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries
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: Monday, October 19, 2015 9:20 AM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal at eprints.org>
Subject: [GOAL] For a publisher to claim copyright, must the author sign a contract?

Annals of the Entomological Society of America is a journal, founded in 1904.  In it, I published more than 20 papers between 1957 and 2009.  In 1966, ESA began posting a copyright statement on the table of contents of each issue.  In 1978 after asking for a vote from ESA members and receiving the consent of the majority, ESA began requiring authors to sign a statement that transferred the copyright of their work to ESA. Between 1967 and 1977, I published 10 papers in the ESA Annals and signed no statements in regard to copyrights.

Early this year, the University of Florida’s institutional repository (IR at UF<http://ufdc.ufl.edu/l/ir>) hired an intern to work with me to make the PDF files of my contributions to the journal literature easily available online.  At the end of the intern’s project, it turned out that ESA was the only publisher that had refused the IR’s request to post the PDFs of any  of my articles.  This included 12 items, 6 or which were in other ESA journals.  It did not include the 10 papers published in the Annals in 1967-1977, but that permission was granted only after I protested I had signed no copyright statement.  In granting the permission to post the PDFs of these papers, ESA asked that the Rights Management statement include the URL that would take the user to the free abstract of the article on the Oxford Journal’s server (for example, http://aesa.oxfordjournals.org/content/62/4/752).  You might notice that at the bottom of the page, the unaffiliated user is offered the opportunity to pay US$39.00 to view a [copy-proof] PDF of my article for 24 hours.



Under current US copyright law, does ESA have a valid claim of copyright to my 10 articles published in its Annals between 1967 and 1977?, even though I signed no copyright statement?



Should you care to view the final product of the intern’s work, it is at http://ufdc.ufl.edu/l/tjwbib.  For a summary of ESA’s copyright history, see its Table 2<http://ufdc.ufl.edu/l/IR00007182/00001>.

Tom

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Thomas J. Walker
Department of Entomology & Nematology
PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive)
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
E-mail: tjw at ufl.edu<mailto:tjw at ufl.edu>      Phone: 352-273-3920
Web: http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/
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