Re: self plagiarism

At 3:47 PM 9/15/93 -0400, PSA2[_at_]vms.cis.pitt.edu wrote:
>I am interested in writing something about what I call self-plagiarism,
>the practice by authors of reusing text in later articles that extend
>an earlier analysis or are addressed to other audiences. The problem
>arises chiefly in the scientific and technical communities where publishers
>routinely require an assignment of copyright as a condition of publication.
>I am looking for either instances in which problems have arisen or people's
>sense of what proper guidelines might be. Within the scientific community
>people have radically different notions about this. I expect the same
>may be true of those in the legal community.

This subject came up briefly a while ago in the YSN mailing list. A grad student wanted a paper published, but the assignment would have precluded any other uses for the student's own work. The catch was that the paper was a subset of a dissertation that was going to become a book. The student felt at first that it would be ok for if the original author used any and all pieces of the article as submitted -- or at least the student WANTED to do so. Some assignments (I believe this one) even went so far as to say that publication of the article including assignment of all copyright rights to any underlying programs (the paper included descriptions of some algorithms or programs).

An interesting aside... Most of the IEEE Intellectual Property Committee members wouldn't sign the IEEE's own assignment agreement (for some articles by them personally). Our committee is working with IEEE publications to update and humanize their publication assignment agreement.

---
Glenn Tenney
tenney[_at_]netcom.com            Amateur radio: AA6ER
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