Re: Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations

From: Joseph Ransdell <ransdell_at_DOOR.NET>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 12:22:12 -0500

A question for Stevan Harnad:

What about the following sort of case:

Suppose the copyright assigned to the publisher permits the author to:

> > > "mount your version of the article on your personal World Wide Web home
> > >page and/or that of your employer's, provided that you (a) cite the Journal
> > >as being the original place of publication and acknowledge XXX as the
> > >copyright owner, and (b) provide an electronic link from your article to the
> > >Publisher's home page for the journal."

And suppose the author has in fact taken advantage of this by mounting his
or her version of the article either on his or her personal website or on
the employer's website, complying with (a) and (b) as well.

Question: Can the third party list the URl of that paper on his or her own
website?

It would no doubt be best if the author's employer had an OAI-compliant
Eprint Archive, but the number of such employers will almost certainly be
quite small for quite a long time to come, and in the interim a portal
website specialized to the author's professional field would accomplish much
the same thing simply by listing it along with its URL.

Moreover, the generic OAI search engine could be modified to include a
separate (but cross-referenced) list of all known papers (with URL)
available via URL on all such websites -- or, indeed, on any websites
whatever.

The papers so listed and thus made available would not have the special
benefits that accrues to the paper as OAI-compliant, such as identifiability
and retrievability via string or keyword searches, but it would still be
identifiable from its title and retrievable by its URL.

Is there any legal problem with this? i.e. with a third-party website
listing of
papers by title and URL, where the paper is archived in accordance with the
permission specified in the quoted passage above?

2nd Question: What about the case where there is no such special permission
mentioned in the copyright transference? Is there any legal problem in this
case?



Best regards,

Joseph Ransdell
ransdell_at_door.net

Professor Emeritus
Dept of Philosophy
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, Texas 79409
Received on Wed Oct 24 2001 - 18:37:23 BST