Here in the United States are various rights one can have as a
"copyright," and the people at Creative Commons spell out those
differences pretty clearly on their Web site (www.creativecommons.org)
for those interested. Although our authors keep the copyright, they do
so under a signed agreement with us that the only right they retain is
the right of proper attribution, as spelled out in the Creative Commons
Attribution License (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/).=20
Rebecca Kennison
Public Library of Science
-----Original Message-----
From: Fytton Rowland [mailto:J.F.Rowland_at_lboro.ac.uk]=20
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 5:05 AM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Open Access Does Not require Republishing and Reprinting
Rights
Copyright is, I believe, significantly different in the UK and the USA.
In the UK, as Iain says, copyright exists as soon as a text is written by
its author, whether it is published or not. In the USA, copyright has to be
registered. In Europe there are moral rights (such as the right to be
identified as the author of your work) which remain with the author even
if the copyright is transferred to another.
If something has been placed in the public domain, anyone may use it for any
purpose whatsoever without reference to the author. Academic authors who
favour Open Access are definitionally happy for anyone to read, download and
print off their scholarly papers free of charge. However, I for one would
be unhappy if a publisher were to take one of my (free) papers off the WWW
and include it in a collection of some sort which is then sold, without any
reference to me. I would not necessarily want any money but I'd like to be
asked! So I think authors are well advised to assert copyright in their
material even if they intend to allow unlimited free access to it.
Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University, UK
Received on Fri Jan 16 2004 - 20:43:35 GMT