This morning I received an email from a publisher inviting me to write a chapter for an ‘upcoming hardcover edited collection’ on a topic of research to which I have made a number of contributions over the years.
I politely declined because of the terms of the copyright transfer agreement that the publisher was good enough to provide up front. I have obscured the name of the company but otherwise it read:
“I (and my coauthors) hereby assign and transfer to XX all rights of copyright ownership and permissions to the article/chapter, including without limitation or restriction, all rights of reproduction, derivation, translation, distribution, sale, reuse, and display of the work, in whole or in part, including recompilation, cross-publication and stand-alone publication, in any and all forms of media now or hereafter known, including all electronic and digital media, as protected by the laws of the United States and foreign countries and to authorize others to make such uses of the work. These rights will become the property of XX from the date of acceptance of the article/chapter for publication and extend for the life of the copyright. I understand that XX, as copyright owner, has authority to grant permission to reproduce the article/chapter.”
As little as three years ago I might have seriously entertained an invitation encumbered by such conditions. But such agreements are, in my view, no longer fit for purpose in academia.
I work at a university that receives a substantial portion of its income from the public purse and I rely on public funding for my research. I agree it is appropriate to pay a reasonable charge for the costs of quality publishing services — as part of making the work freely available, which in turn is part of returning value to the public for its investment and adding further value to it by ensuring that dissemination and use of my work within and beyond the academic community is as effective as possible.
The clause above infringes my capacity to do my duty as part of the scientific community. Could I suggest that publishers still using such clauses contact their lawyers and start re-writing?
Thanks for this — the more people refuse to put up with these kinds of conditions the sooner publishers will change!
Writing book chapters that are not open access is not a good idea these days. When I discovered in 1987 that the classical theory of affinity and efficacy contained a fatal flaw, I published in a book chapter and it was largely ignored, despite the fact that I provided a pdf: http://www.onemol.org.uk/?page_id=175#dc1987
That being said, my most highly cited works are book chapters, especially Fitting and statistical analysis of single-channel records (D Colquhoun, FJ Sigworth), the only thing I’ve written that has over 1000 citations. Paradoxically, that’s another reason not to publish in books. Those citations are ignored by the (hopelessly inefficient) web of science, scopus etc.
There you go, chasing the metrics again. When will you learn David? 😉
Seriously though, the scholarly review article/book chapter format can still be a very valuable medium for synthesis but these days it really should also end up as free to read on the internet for maximum impact on the field.
Perhaps you should have responded by offering them a non-exclusive license to reproduce your work. It is reasonable for them to have copyright on the entire book of articles from different authors, but not on an individual article.
A reasonable offer would have been treated reasonably. I could have consented to grant them a licence to publish their formatted version of any article I wrote, as long as I retain copyright on the original words and images that I would have produced.
Another possible response: “I have released my article under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC By) licence, and this cannot be rescinded. However, this licence allows you to publish my work, and you have my blessing to do so.”
Yes… but that’s a tricky strategy prior to publication since it gives them an out and then my article is just published somewhere fairly nondescript. I know that on the internet anything can be found. But still.
I am sure you are aware of this, Stephen:
http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/authors/addendum
Thanks Kaveh, I am. But what I would really like to know about are instances where authors have used it successfully. I did ask about this on Twitter a while ago but didn’t hear of any good cases.
Stephen, I would be interested if you know about cases where publishers either contacted authors (asking them not to break the copyright arrangement) or worse directly sent their lawyers.
I remember discussions between academics on the usenet who were unhappy with copyright agreements already in the late 90s. I distinctly remember people like Roderick Page et al. discussing licensing stuff on mailing lists.
What I distinctly do not remember are any documented cases where publishers actually pressed the rights they wrote into those strange “agreements”.
To draw you a picture: every time a PhD student in our lab is preparing The Thesis including already published articles for The Publication, the question is asked again, and no one seems to know if anything “bad” actually could happen. So, they just try their luck in the end. Because The Publication is a requirement to get The Title, the whole thing is either just put on an online repository of The University or an actually printed version is issued in small numbers by The University Press. The PhD student gets the degree, everybody forgets about it… and next time, the same questions are asked. And The Commitee does not know, nor really cares.
So, _are_ there any cases?
What about the later career: anyone got a DCMA takedown notice for a self-hosted article? Anyone got a injunction preventing him/her to publish a piece again (in other form, at a meeting, in a book…)?
We should really have a clearing-house mechanism for things like that. Maybe, the Royal (i.e.,in other circumstances, National) Academies could offer one?
Thanks for the comment Hans.
To respond quickly but briefly, the best known recent cases are Elsevier’s take-down notices issued to authors who were putting their PDFs on sites like academia.edu. I wrote about this last year.
So: unsavoury, but not threatening in a legal sense.
Surely even Elsevier knows it would be PR suicide to sue an author for making his own work available.
Stephen, have you received a huge increase in open-access ‘publishers’ wanting you to contribute reviews (in which it appears some researcher has actually done some homework, as they mention your expertise in reasonable terms, as opposed to copy/pasting the title of your most recent paper), but buried in the small print it’s clear it costs lots of money? Some of my younger colleagues have run afoul of this, and were flattered enough to respond, but I believe many of these are predatory.
Some – and this is a tricky area.
On the one hand, most OA policies of funders refer only to primary research reports — they’re not typically directly funded on grants — so review articles would appear to be something of a grey area. However, I would prefer to see them as a vital and valuable part of the research enterprise and would like to see as much of the scholarly literature made open access.
That said, there does seem to be a rise in OA journal soliciting input without being very up-front about the cost implications. I’ve been approached by Frontiers, not just to write a review by to guest edit a whole issue on a topic close to my heart. So far I simply haven’t had the time but one other factor that has caused me to hesitate are the costs that would be incurred by anyone that I recruited to contribute. Cost have to be faced as a real part of doing research — even the bits that involve synthesis and reflection — but I’d still like to seem them kept as low as possible.
As for your younger colleagues, I hope they didn’t get burned too badly but the lesson is to make sure to establish exactly what are the costs and who owns the rights before you agree. It would be a good idea then to see if your institution offers any financial support — some do. The bottom line is that we authors simply have to become more savvy about these things.