> > There is no disagreement. I support Stevan's view that by doing the
> > following:
> >
> > 1 author posts unrefereed preprint on web site
> >
> > 2 author submits same at a later date (maybe five minutes later!) to
> > a refereed journal
> >
> > 3 if/when accepted, author makes amendments to the article
> > in the light of the referees' and editor's comments
> >
> > 4 author signs copyright assignment form of publisher and hand on
> > heart confirms that this article has not appeared anywhere before
> >
> > 5 author then posts note onto preprint, pointing out the sorts of
> > areas where corrections might need to be made by a reader to
> > improve the text
> >
> > then the author has done nothing wrong, has broken no law, and has not
> > signed a contract (s)he should not have signed.
This kind of conduct is all fine and well, but perhaps a better approach
would be a standard boiler-plate licensing agreement which bound the
publiser and the author, permitting electronic redistribution of and
article to the author, but possible restricting the authors right to
redistribute the article on paper.
An interesting basis is the open publication license:
http://opencontent.org/openpub/
mainly refering to options A and B which are the kind of compromises a
paper publisher might be willing to make.
Owen Cliffe
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT