Authors and copyright

There has been considerable debate on email lists and elsewhere about the rights and wrongs of publishers wanting to acquire copyright from authors of journal articles. ALPSP’s own survey of journal contributors, What Authors Want, indicated that the ability to retain copyright was not a deciding factor in an author ’s choice of journal. Nevertheless, more than half of the respondents felt that the author should be able to retain copyright (this feeling was strongest among authors in the arts and social sciences). Of these, more than half felt that the publisher should be granted full publishing rights, while the remainder only favoured granting limited publishing rights. These days it is essential that the publisher is explicitly granted the requisite rights (and keeps good records so that this can be proved if necessary). Recent legal cases, such as Tasini, have demonstrated the importance of this when mounting journal content electronically; and in the UK, the arrangements with the Copyright Licensing Agency for photocopying and digitization licences mean that an arbitrary division of journal licensing income will be made unless the publisher can demonstrate that it ‘owns or controls’ the necessary rights. But what rights does the publisher actually need? Clearly, they need the right to publish in print and, increasingly, electronic format; this should be an exclusive right to avoid both competition and potential confusion (e.g. duplicate publication). They also need the right to grant licences to other people (such as the Copyright Licensing Agency, mentioned above). Publishers have often argued that they need copyright, both in order to protect their and the author’s rights in case of any infringement, and to simplify the processing of permissions requests. However, it is perfectly possible (with the author’s permission) to act on her behalf in defence of copyright; the publisher can also undertake the processing of permissions requests on the author’s behalf. It is therefore hard to find a justification, other than convenience, for insisting on taking the author’s copyright. What is it, then, that authors actually want to be able to do? Many publishers already allow authors to retain fairly extensive rights to redistribute and reuse their own work for their own or their institution’s purposes – indeed, this saves the publisher unnecessary work in processing permission requests for which no charge will normally be made. Publishers are also seeing increasing numbers of requests from authors who want to mount their articles (preferably in final, published form) on their own or their institution’s website. I am not aware that those publishers who agree to this have seen any damage to their journals; if anything, it probably achieves increased visibility. Indeed, some publishers actually provide authors with PDF files for this purpose. In some subjects there are wellestablished preprint archives to which authors may have submitted their work in advance of publication; while some publishers refuse to consider such articles for their journals, many now accept them and may consider a reference to the published version to be good publicity. The proposed ‘e-print’ archives, such as PubMed Central, which will contain final published versions of articles in a single database, might constitute a more serious threat to journals; publishers are, I suspect, adopting a ‘wait and see’ policy( see also Sue Thorn’s Personal View, ‘New life for journals or the death of the learned society?’, later in this issue). There are two ways of satisfying authors’ wishes while still protecting the interests of the journals in which they publish. Either the publisher can acquire copyright, but explicitly grant back to the author all the rights outlined above, or the author can retain copyright and grant the publisher a ‘Licence to Publish’. While there are plenty of examples of copyright assignment documents, there are Authors and copyright 75