Re: Garfield: "Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication"

On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Stevan Harnad <harnad[_at_]ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> This is a red herring, conflating researchers' criteria for
> what counts as a formal publication with trade criteria for
> protecting toll-revenues.

This is not a red herring. I provided the definition of publication as seen by the U.S. Copyright Law. As indicated by your post, you have a special meaning of publication that does not agree with the law. It is not totally clear from your post which definition the publishers use.

> THIS is the sense of publication that Gene is talking about and this
> should already have been obvious from the fact that he uses the word
> "publication" in both senses in the very same sentence above, in
> answering (in the negative) his own question, namely, "Is Acknowledged
> Self-Archiving Prior Publication?" And he is addressing this question
> to fellow-researchers -- authors, referees, and editors -- not to drafters
> of copyright law.

I must wonder why you submit your post to CNI-COPYRIGHT. What are you trying to accomplish?

> WHY was this question not addressing copyright law or copyright
> lawyers? Because, if you will look carefully at every one of the criteria
> invoked in the legal "definition" of publication above -- "sale, transfer
> of ownership, rental, lease, lending" -- every single one of them is
> utterly irrelevant to the special, anomalous literature which is the only
> one of which we are speaking here. For refereed research publications are
> all author give-aways: Their authors do not seek to sell, rent, lease,
> lend or otherwise transfer their ownership. ...

The U.S. Copyright Law does not require sale to be at least $0.01 (one cent). If an author wants to give the copies of his article to public at no cost, the law considers it as a sale at $0.00. It is like putting a stack of 100 copies of his article on one corner of street so that anyone walking by can take one for free.

Likewise, if the author gives a copy of his article to each library for lending to public at no cost, the law considers it as a publication even though he does not earn any royalty.

> .... Their "moral ownership" --
> i.e., the fact that it is they who wrote them and not someone else --
> is of course retained by these special authors, as by all authors. But
> the texts themselves are all given away; not a penny of royalties or
> fees or other form of income from their sale/rental/lease/lending is
> received or sought by their authors.
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#5

The law does not recognize "moral ownership". You are making it up.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com>

Number of days left until 1-1-2019 when all knowledge of 1923 in the land of the U.S.A. will be freed from their copyright owners' prisons: 5,962

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain. Received on Wed Sep 04 2002 - 23:18:40 GMT