Re: L.Rev (C) Release

On Mon, 25 Oct 99, John Kasdan <kasdan[_at_]columbia.edu> wrote:
>
> I recently received a proposed contract from a law school (which shall
> remain nameless) IP Review. The clause that got to me was:
>
> 3. Grant of Rights. The Journal shall have the exclusive worldwide
> rights of first publication, and of republishing and authorizing the
> republication, of the Article in the English language, in any and
> all media now known or later developed, including but not limited to
> computerized storage and retrieval systems such as Lexis and Westlaw
> legal research systems, the Internet, and CD-ROM. The Author shall
> have the right to grant the non-exclusive right of republication of
> the article in any language other than English, after first
> publication in the English language by the Journal. (Other stuff
> about attribution and publicity.)
>
> So, as I understand it, I could place my piece on my class web site
> either with permission of the Journal, or if I translated it into
> French. I have a couple of questions about this. First, does anyone
> have any idea of why they want such a right? It's not like there's
> any money in all this. Secondly, do people in this group sign such
> things? The Journal assures me that they have been using this clause
> for a while and that no one has objected. I can't imagine anyone who
> is publishing in an IP review even contemplating granting such broad
> rights.

Although I can't speak for that particular journal, as a former journal editor I can make some guesses:

1. Journals really want to be the first to publish articles. We would refuse out of hand any submission that had ever been published elsewhere, including on a website. It's important to the journal's reputation (or so we're taught to believe) that they only publish first-publication materials. Why allow publication (even pre-publication) in non-English languages? I suspect largely because a) no one ever translates law review articles and b) foreign language journals are in competition with English language journals.
2. Actually, there *is* money in there. Our journal's contract with Westlaw paid us for every hit on an article from our journal. While not enough to raise a family on, we received significant funds from this annually. So it's *very* important to be able to get rights to republish the article on services like Lexis and Westlaw.

Richard A. Schafer
<schafer[_at_]mail.utexas.edu> Received on Wed Oct 27 1999 - 05:21:17 GMT