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

Mon Oct 19 18:05:22 BST 2015

Agreed: if you did not sign a copyright form, then you did not assign
copyright. You therefore retain copyright.

However ...
Owning copyright does not allow you to do anything you want if you have
granted somebody else an exclusive right to use the work in a particular
way.
You did grant them a licence to publish your work (either explicitly or
implicitly). Assigning a licence to publish does not require a formal
signature, and can be implemented by means of an online tick-box, or an
email/letter asserting that you are granting the journal/publisher the
right to publish. So you may have done this when you let them publish your
article (=agreeing to their terms and conditions).

And their terms and conditions may give them exclusive rights to publish -
so that even though you own copyright, you do not have the right to publish
your article elsewhere without their permission.

However ...
It is possible that they did not have water-tight systems in place that
long ago and so you could argue that you did not grant them such a licence
to publish.

In such a case as this I would take the argument back to them that what you
are doing is providing promotion of the articles and the journal. I would
also strongly encourage you to add the published article DOI so that any
citation is properly credited and linked to the permanent Version of
Record. Although this takes readers to the paywall article, they can make
the decision at that point to pay for the article (with any value-added
technology that the publisher provides), or seek out a free version (via
Google, emailing you or finding your site).

Again, I am not a lawyer, but I do advise people on publishing contracts
and provide copyright training.

Pippa

*****
Pippa Smart
Research Communication and Publishing Consultant
PSP Consulting
Oxford, UK
Tel: +44 1865 864255 or +44 7775 627688
email: pippa.smart at gmail.com
Web: www.pspconsulting.org
****
Editor-in-Chief of *Learned Publishing <http://www.learned-publishing.org>*
Editor of the *ALPSP Alert
<http://www.alpsp.org/Ebusiness/ResearchPublications/ALPSPAlert.aspx>*,
****

On 19 October 2015 at 17:28, Paul Royster <proyster2 at unl.edu> wrote:

> 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
>
> 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
>
>
>
> ====================================
>
> 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      Phone: 352-273-3920
>
> Web: http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/
>
> ====================================
>
>
>
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>
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