Losing the copyright when publishing a research article?

[f95toli]

f95toli, yes. You can give a publisher a "transfer of copyright" but that doesn't mean you loose the copyright to your publication. The person's name and article will still need to be mentioned if it is used in scientific circles. Credit is given to the person that has written or contributed in a scientific article. We can often times see that within peer-reviewed articles in Science and Nature.

Somewhat OT:
I never hold copyright for my publications. Since I work for an organization that is owned by the British government all the papers I publish fall under "Crown copyright" (=copyright is held by the state) which is actually retained even when my papers are published. We are not allowed to sign copyright transfer forms; what we do instead is that we send the editors a "permission to publish" which all major journals accept.
As far as I know there is a similar system in place for federally funded work in the US.

Also, of course my papers are cited etc. using my name, but that has nothing to do with who legally owns the copyright.

 

[ZapperZ]

Somewhat OT:
I never hold copyright for my publications. Since I work for an organization that is owned by the British government all the papers I publish fall under "Crown copyright" (=copyright is held by the state) which is actually retained even when my papers are published. We are not allowed to sign copyright transfer forms; what we do instead is that we send the editors a "permission to publish" which all major journals accept.
As far as I know there is a similar system in place for federally funded work in the US.

There is. Papers published by authors from a US Nat'l labs have a different "modification" to the journal's copyright requirement. The publishing office at the labs will modify the copyright document of the journal to reflect the non-exclusivity of the journal's rights.

So yes, none of us holds the copyright to any of our work, since they were funded by public money.

Zz.

 

[CGR_JAMA]

Look, there is this DOCUMENT that you have to sign and return to the publisher to transfer the copyright. Until you sign that, it doesn't matter at what stage of the review process your manuscript is at, the publisher does not have the copyright.

I am not sure what the whole point of this thread really is. If it is simply being able to distribute your paper even after publishing, that is commonly done. The Physical Review journals does NOT disallow authors to, say, put their papers on their website even after publication! The only thing you can't do is either to sell it, or put it on a commercial website. So you DO see authors allowing free downloads from their personal webpages, and no journals so far have had any issues with that.

So what is your complaint again?

Zz.

Well, I'm sorry if I bodered someone, I was not complaining just trying to understand.
And you are right, I have seen that those are the usual rights granted to authors after the copyright is transferred to the publishers.

This thread started because for someone like me not having a support institution for doing research the income coming from selling "somehow" the article or a book derived from it was interesting. That’s my only motivation for retaining the copyright. But it was not the one that pushed me to write the article, that was just doing some science.

To release the copyright is a valid option, I won't complain about that. It’s more than I can't get use to the idea and that’s why I'm ok to submitting it to arXiv of Physics Forums.
As I stated before, based on what was talked in this forum's thread I made up my mind on giving up on selling the article in favor of getting access to a review process. That works fine to me and I believe is as valid as the previous option.

The point on this thread was to get enough information for taking such a decision and clearly you helped me to do so.

Thanks all for replying

 

[ZapperZ]

This thread started because for someone like me not having a support institution for doing research the income coming from selling "somehow" the article or a book derived from it was interesting. That’s my only motivation for retaining the copyright. But it was not the one that pushed me to write the article, that was just doing some science.

No one makes money out of holding a copyright on a peer-reviewed paper. Period.

Does that answer your question?

I'm also moving this thread out of "Career Guidance". It has nothing to do with it.

Zz.

 

[Moonbear]

This part is very hard to believe. Perhaps you can clarify what you meant. I'm assuming you didn't mean that if I publish a proof of a mathematical theorem in a journal, I would have to pay the publishers of the journal to include the proof in a book? Nobody would be able to publish books if this was true.

That's exactly what happens. If you publish in a journal, you assign copyright to the journal. If you want to use what you published in that journal in another source, the publisher of that other source needs to pay the first journal to use it (of course, if you happen to publish your book with the same publishing company that owns the journal you're published in, they can waive these charges).

And, it's true, there's very little money to be made in publishing peer-reviewed journals. A lot of scientific societies used to publish their own journals in their fields, back when there was some small profit to be made, which then supplemented other functions of the society (such as keeping registration fees lower for the members of that society). But, nowadays, especially with online publishing reducing the individual subscriptions to paper journals, scientific societies are selling the journals to big publishing companies because they lose money rather than make money. Only by producing MANY journals in many different fields and selling bulk subscriptions to libraries can a publisher make any money for those journals.

And, really, even if you were paid royalties every time someone specifically wanted a copy of your article, how many people really are going to read it? Authors of fiction novels make a reasonable profit off royalties only because they're selling millions of copies, not because there's a lot of money to be made from any single copy. When you have a niche market like a scientific journal, you're lucky to be selling thousands of copies if something is REALLY popular. What would you earn on that? $10? It wouldn't be worth the hassle of claiming it on your income taxes.

 

[ZapperZ]

That's exactly what happens. If you publish in a journal, you assign copyright to the journal. If you want to use what you published in that journal in another source, the publisher of that other source needs to pay the first journal to use it (of course, if you happen to publish your book with the same publishing company that owns the journal you're published in, they can waive these charges).

Actually, I don't think so. You can't copyright ideas, in this case (that's in the domain of a patent).

None of the science journals, and certainly not the ones that covers physics, would hold a copyright to such ideas. If true, as has been said, you can never talk about superconductivity or any other physics principles and discoveries, since those have been published in journals. I only need to point out review articles that are quite commonly published (see, Physics Reports, Report on the Progress in Physics, Review of Modern Physics journals). These review papers use ideas, publications, etc. that have been published elsewhere, not in the sense of outright copy verbatim, but in regurgitating the contents.

So while the actual journal that published the, say, derivation of something, holds the copyright to that paper, it doesn't hold the copyright to the idea of that derivation.

Zz.

 

[ViewsofMars]

There is. Papers published by authors from a US Nat'l labs have a different "modification" to the journal's copyright requirement. The publishing office at the labs will modify the copyright document of the journal to reflect the non-exclusivity of the journal's rights.

So yes, none of us holds the copyright to any of our work, since they were funded by public money.

Zz.

Zz, brief mention, there are also privately held companies that have employees who do research.

 

[ViewsofMars]

From Nature Publishing Group:

This publishers' policy applies to all journals published by the Nature Publishing Group (NPG), including the Nature journals.

NPG does not require authors of original (primary) research papers to assign copyright of their published contributions. Authors grant NPG an exclusive license to publish, in return for which they can reuse their papers in their future printed work without first requiring permission from the publisher of the journal. For commissioned articles (for example, Reviews, News and Views), copyright is retained by NPG.
[Please read on . . .]
http://www.nature.com/authors/editorial_policies/license.html

 

[rewebster]

Is that a standard procedure on people doing research?

I understand that if during the revision the author does not agree with the publisher and/or reviewers on demanded corrections he has the right to change his opinion and decide not to publish with them. Then no copyright transfer should be effective since "acceptance" was not reached yet. But I believe it is not a valid alternative to follow all the review process and reject to finish it when you fill the "acceptance" is near to occur because you know once it happens you are done with the copyright issue. I'm sure I'm not getting well that point due to my lack of experience.

you could always self-publish it, but then you'd have to self-promote, and self-distribute it, etc. also.

Like it was said, if you've signed it and dated it, it is basically copyrighted---you can 'officially' get it copyrighted (in the USA, the last time I checked it was fairly inexpensive--$6?)

I think it would really depend on how well how many people like reading it ---and how large of a range of people it would entice those to buy it, often by word of mouth...

edit:
Fees have gone up some:

http://www.copyright.gov/docs/fees.html


Online registration of a basic claim in an original work of authorship (electronic filing) $35

 

[ViewsofMars]

Like it was said, if you've signed it and dated it, it is basically copyrighted---you can 'officially' get it copyrighted (in the USA, the last time I checked it was fairly inexpensive--$6?)

Hi rewebster. Good idea! You seem to be referring to my post #45. That advise was given to me by my lawyer. I would like to add that you can mail yourself the document as well. Be sure not to open it when it arrives in the mail. I think the most important thing is keeping the rewrites of your document before it is finalized. I have boxes of those! What's interesting to me is the little scibbles and notations scattered about. It's fun to look back on stuff like that that, especially the ones from 15 or 20 years ago. There is a history of your past and what was transforming your thoughts. Awesome looking into how one's own mind unfolds over time. The rough drawings even seem to be inspiring. More importantly, it is part of the research that transpired prior to the finale.

 

[ZapperZ]

Zz, brief mention, there are also privately held companies that have employees who do research.

You might have misread my intention. When I said that none of "us" holds copyright etc.. etc., I was referring to those of us (such as me) who work at a Nat'l Lab. I didn't mean that ALL of "us" who publish hold no copyright etc... I, of course, am fully aware that private companies also conduct their own research. Bell Labs, NEC labs, IBM labs, etc. are the prominent examples. I also collaborate with many others who work in private companies.

Zz.

 

[ViewsofMars]

You might have misread my intention. When I said that none of "us" holds copyright etc.. etc., I was referring to those of us (such as me) who work at a Nat'l Lab. I didn't mean that ALL of "us" who publish hold no copyright etc... I, of course, am fully aware that private companies also conduct their own research. Bell Labs, NEC labs, IBM labs, etc. are the prominent examples. I also collaborate with many others who work in private companies.
Zz.

No Zz, I did not misread your intention. My comment was merely meant as brief expansion upon your dialogue, giving you the opportunity to further share valuable information.

 

[Proton Soup]

i see the same "papers" in different journals all the time. they just rewrite the same material a slightly different way and, VIOLA! new copyright.

surely you can still write about your research, even if you signed away copyright of one article to a journal.

 

[the_house]

I would like to add that you can mail yourself the document as well. Be sure not to open it when it arrives in the mail.

For the most part, this will not do anything for you. See, e.g.,:
http://www.snopes.com/legal/postmark.asp

As to the larger question of transferring copyright to a journal, it is true that this is largely irrelevant for most researchers. There is little to no opportunity to directly derive money from your research articles, so you're probably not really losing much money by actually giving them copyright (rather than some arrangement where you would still own the copyright but grant them various publication rights). Also, when you transfer your copyright, most journals explicitly give you permission to do most of the things authors would want to do, such as keeping the preprint posted on the arXiv and posting a copy on your personal webpage (although I think normally these copies have to be your version, not the final version that was edited by the journal, which seems quite fair). In addition, as has been mentioned, copyright only covers a particular expression of an idea---exact or similar strings of text or particular figures. Really, if it made a big difference to most people, they would collectively demand a change and the journals would be forced to change. So I submit that for most people, most of the time, it doesn't matter.

On the other hand, that does not mean there are no issues. There are things that you might want to do that don't involve money at all, but still involve copyright. For example, you can not upload a figure from one of your papers to wikipedia. Sure, you may be able to get around it by making a new figure that looks somewhat different, but the fact remains that you can no longer do what you want with (what seems like it should be) your own creation. Also, if I understand correctly, when the arXiv was new, authors had to really fight certain journals to eventually change the terms such that they were allowed to keep the preprint of a paper on the arXiv. Sure, it is true that most (if not all) journals now allow it, but it is an uncomfortable position that if something new comes up that you might want to do with your own work, you may be prevented from doing it, even if it seems completely reasonable and doesn't hurt the journal at all. It can be worth a discussion of whether it's really necessary for journals to actually gain ownership of copyright rather than just being granted a license to do everything they might need to do with it (which could even be an exclusive license that explicitly restricts what the author can do with it).

 

[rewebster]

Hi rewebster. Good idea! You seem to be referring to my post #45. That advise was given to me by my lawyer. I would like to add that you can mail yourself the document as well. Be sure not to open it when it arrives in the mail. I think the most important thing is keeping the rewrites of your document before it is finalized. I have boxes of those! What's interesting to me is the little scibbles and notations scattered about. It's fun to look back on stuff like that that, especially the ones from 15 or 20 years ago. There is a history of your past and what was transforming your thoughts. Awesome looking into how one's own mind unfolds over time. The rough drawings even seem to be inspiring. More importantly, it is part of the research that transpired prior to the finale.

Sounds GREAT!


would you assign all copyrights over to me for $1?

 

[CGR_JAMA]

you could always self-publish it, but then you'd have to self-promote, and self-distribute it, etc. also.

Like it was said, if you've signed it and dated it, it is basically copyrighted---you can 'officially' get it copyrighted (in the USA, the last time I checked it was fairly inexpensive--$6?)

I think it would really depend on how well how many people like reading it ---and how large of a range of people it would entice those to buy it, often by word of mouth...

edit:
Fees have gone up some:

http://www.copyright.gov/docs/fees.html


Online registration of a basic claim in an original work of authorship (electronic filing) $35

Thanks rewebster for your accurate contribution. I have followed the usual copyright procedure for registering my work at the local patents office.

 

[shoehorn]

This thread has become thoroughly silly.

 

[ViewsofMars]

the_house and rewebster, I listen to my lawyer! Also, one might consider a person owns a business.

I think the most important information pertaining to this topic can be found in post #58.

 

[Moonbear]

Actually, I don't think so. You can't copyright ideas, in this case (that's in the domain of a patent).

None of the science journals, and certainly not the ones that covers physics, would hold a copyright to such ideas. If true, as has been said, you can never talk about superconductivity or any other physics principles and discoveries, since those have been published in journals. I only need to point out review articles that are quite commonly published (see, Physics Reports, Report on the Progress in Physics, Review of Modern Physics journals). These review papers use ideas, publications, etc. that have been published elsewhere, not in the sense of outright copy verbatim, but in regurgitating the contents.

So while the actual journal that published the, say, derivation of something, holds the copyright to that paper, it doesn't hold the copyright to the idea of that derivation.

Zz.

I thought they meant actually re-writing the text itself. The concept you can use again. I guess we interpreted that differently (maybe because I don't have to publish proofs of theorems to know how it's done).

For example, I wanted to use a figure from a previous article in a review article, and was told we had to pay to use it, even though it was the figure we published in that previous article to illustrate a concept. But, yes, the idea was still ours, and by remaking the figure with some modifications so it was no longer identical, we didn't have to pay to reuse the ideas contained within it.

I think publishers are having a really hard time making money off journals in the electronic age. I'm seeing more and more rules change about how articles are distributed, and am getting the impression they are having a hard time selling subscriptions without something that forces people to get the articles only from them. Afterall, we used to have to pay for reprints from the journal if we wanted to distribute copies of our articles to other scientists (I just discovered a heapload of reprint request cards in a storage room in my department that we're now using for scrap note paper). Now with PDFs readily available, I don't think anybody buys reprints anymore. Instead, I notice more increases in page charges and color figure fees. (I always think it's a bit funny seeing that little disclaimer on every article that because the authors had to pay page charges for publication, the article is considered an advertisement. )

On the other hand, this is at least true for NIH funded research, that because the research was funded with taxpayer money, journals publishing it have to make it available freely to the public within 6 months of publication (I think NIH really wanted it all immediately available, but publishers basically put their collective feet down saying they would just stop publishing any of that research if they couldn't have exclusive rights to distribution for 6 months to make some money on it).

 

[Andy Resnick]

On the other hand, this is at least true for NIH funded research, that because the research was funded with taxpayer money, journals publishing it have to make it available freely to the public within 6 months of publication (I think NIH really wanted it all immediately available, but publishers basically put their collective feet down saying they would just stop publishing any of that research if they couldn't have exclusive rights to distribution for 6 months to make some money on it).

It's not as simple as that. Originally (I think this was one of the sticking points), NIH wanted *all* results obtained by NIH dollars to be open domain- including, for example, lab notebooks with the raw data.

For most of us, this is no big deal. For a drug company undertaking clinical trials of drugs, having the raw data openly available for, for example, a personal injury lawyer to peruse is a bad idea.

And, for an example of how murky issues get regarding peer-reviewed open publications, patents and "intellectual property", one need look no further than the sad early history of the laser, which is still, to this day, being debated.

 

[Moonbear]

It's not as simple as that. Originally (I think this was one of the sticking points), NIH wanted *all* results obtained by NIH dollars to be open domain- including, for example, lab notebooks with the raw data.

For most of us, this is no big deal. For a drug company undertaking clinical trials of drugs, having the raw data openly available for, for example, a personal injury lawyer to peruse is a bad idea.

Yeah, I was sticking with the journal publishing issue for this thread. Indeed, there was a whole big minefield of things NIH wanted to open to the public that in an idealistic utopia would have been a wonderful idea, but in the real world of needing to make money and deal with lawyers and the way the relatively ignorant public would interpret scientific data, and such, were terrible in practical terms.