European authors

I've learned a lot by just following this list on copyright issues, and now I have a question (I'm a contracts manager at a scholarly press) especially for European readers:

If a French scholar, say, publishes an article in a French or Italian journal and then this article is translated into English and is published in a book made up of contributions from many different authors around a particular subject, is it correct that the American publisher can assume that the French (or Italian) scholar has kept his rights in his original article? Would we then need to contract only with this scholar in order to publish?

Henri Bensussen, Contracts Manager
Stanford University Press
<henrietta.bensussen[_at_]forsythe.stanford.edu> Received on Fri Feb 27 1998 - 17:58:21 GMT