RE: Re: "University as author?"

My experience in the Law discipline, in the U.S. and Canada (though not U.K. or Australia, where policy tends to be more like the non-Law disciplines referred to below), is that Law journals _tend_ to respect the author's copyright, seeking only the licences (licenses) to which Terry refers. Ironically, an exception is the law journal in my own university (Queen's University at Kingston, Canada) which insisted (current policy may be more nuanced) on an assignment of a joint interest in copyright -- on the theory that the pre-publication editorial work constituted the Journal a joint author. There are lots of problems with that position -- not the least of which was that the amount of "authorial" contribution in the editorial work varied enormously from contribution to contribution, while the policy of an assignment of a joint interest was uniform and applicable in all cases.

The comment to which Terry replied may have been stimulated more by journal policies outside Law. In scientific, engineering and medical disciplines, in particular, the leading journals are not university-student projects (that model is almost unique to the Law discipline and then only in the U.S. and Canada), but are commercial projects of large, powerful, profit-making enterprises. The profit potential in controlling accessing to leading articles in engineering, science and medicine is considerable. A price which an academic author(s) must pay, (in those disciplines the typical model is of multiple authors of the same piece) for having a piece published in one of those non-Law disciplines' "leading" (_re_ tenure, promotion and Nobel prizes) journals may often be to sign over much more of the authors' copyright than is common in the U.S. Law-discipline model (& Canadian Law-discipline model -- the only other country to adopt the U.S. model in Law, I believe).

Denis

-----Original Message-----
From: CNI-COPYRIGHT -- Copyright & Intellectual Property [mailto:CNI-COPYRIGHT[_at_]cni.org] On Behalf Of Terry Carroll Sent: August 16, 2005 6:01 PM
To: CNI-COPYRIGHT -- Copyright & Intellectual Property Subject: [CNI-(C)] Re: "University as author?"

On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Agenbroad, James (Civ,ARL/CISD) wrote:

> I'd wager good money that he assigned (gave up) his copyrights for free
> to the journal that he published in.

Well, only if he owned it to begin with, right?

Is this the standard practice, by the way? I've run one law journal, and our practice was to get a right of first publication, with right to sublicense for reprints and Lexis/Westlaw. The author retained his copyright. Received on Thu Aug 18 2005 - 01:25:01 GMT