RE: Pre-electronic publications

        Marcia Keyser wrote:

	"[...] Take a research scientist who was actively 
	publishing in scientific journals in the 1980s and 90s, and whose 
	contracts did not specify anything about electronic versions of the 
	articles. The same scientist, of course, has lost the copies of the 
	publishing contract (but not the articles). Is he or she free to 
	publish these articles on his web site? [...]"

	I think that since the 1980s and 90s not much has changed. The copyright would apply to all versions: print, electronic, or otherwise, and unless the original contract specifically exempted surrender of the electronic versions to the author, or somehow granted the author some rights (which seemed to be unusual among print publishers of the era), the publisher probably still owns the stuff in all its incarnations. 

	Of course if the author signed off on one of those "all rights now known or ever discovered in perpetuity and so forth" contracts, then the publisher owns any patents on the reverse-engineering of the author's thought patterns as well, and can disallow the individual from thinking in the manner of their younger self. 





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