On 7/27/98, Stephen Childe <s.childe[_at_]plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> It is becoming increasingly common for the organisers of academic
> conferences to insist on the authors of submitted papers signing a
> form to transfer their copyright to the organiser or the organising
> institution or publisher.
I have to say that I have almost never encountered this, despite a fairly extensive schedule of conference speaking. Perhaps it is more common in the UK?
I have on occasion been asked to sign a copyright release for audio taping of my presentation, which seems to have become quite common. On the sole occasion on which I have been asked to sign a copyright transfer for my paper, the conference organizers quickly retreated from this position, as it was a conference on intellectual property, and all the presenters were IP profs, who objected violently.
> Can anyone suggest what the organiser would lose by not bothering
> with such a stipulation? It does not seem to protect against
> submission of the same material to several conferences, if some of
> the words are changed. The advantage of being able to re-publish
> in a further publication without further permission seems
> insignificant.
It seems to me that it saves the organizer two types of trouble: first, the trouble of determining what rights or type of license s/he really needs -- just transfer the whole copyright, that's simpler. Second, it saves trouble down the road if some new application of the material arises -- say, posting the papers on the web -- which was not envisioned or contemplated at the time of the original conference. If the organizer holds the whole copyright, s/he needn't go back to the authores for additional permissions.
My view tends to be that if someone in the process has to go to some extra trouble to get future permissions, it might as well be the conference organizer as me.
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