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Sally Morris, Guest Editorialist

There have long been rumblings about the rights andwrongs of publishers wanting to acquire copyrightfrom authors of journal articles; after all, publishersrarely insist on this if a book author or contributor pre-fers to retain copyright in his or her own name. The de-bate has recently become more heated, as evidencedby a campaign in the United Kingdom ostensibly onbehalf of Academic Authors, and some strong exchangeson the “September Forum” e-mail list (see http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html).

The Association of Learned and Professional SocietyPublishers (ALPSP) therefore decided that it would beappropriate to find out what journal contributors them-selves thought. In late 1998 and early 1999, the ALPSPcarried out a large-scale survey of 10,000 internationalcontributors to journals in all disciplines; to our amaze-ment, over 30 percent replied. The resultant report,

What Authors Want

, was published in early 1999. Theresponses indicated that the ability to retain copyrightwas not a deciding factor in an author’s choice of journal.Nevertheless, more than half of the respondents feltthat the author should be able to retain copyright (thisfeeling was strongest among authors in the arts and so-cial sciences). Of these, more than half felt that thepublisher should be granted full publishing rights whilethe remainder favored granting only limited publishingrights. As representatives of learned and professional

Morris

is Secretary-General, Association of Learned andProfessional Society Publishers, South House, The Street,Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UnitedKingdom; e-mail: sec-gen@alpsp.org.uk.

This article is an updated version of an editorial that wasfirst published as “Guest Editorial: Authors and Copy-right,”

Learned Publishing

13, no. 2 (April 2000): 75–76.

Sally Morris

,

Guest Editorialist

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societies who exist to serve their member communities,we felt that it behooved us to take note of these views.

What is it, then, that authors actually want to be ableto do? Many publishers already allow them to retainfairly extensive rights to redistribute and reuse theirown work, for their own or their institution’s purposes.Indeed, this saves the publisher unnecessary time andeffort in processing permission requests for which nocharge will normally be made (this is almost common-place in book contracts and is becoming increasinglywidespread in journal contributor agreements as well).Publishers are also seeing increasing numbers of re-quests from authors who want to mount their articles(preferably in final, published form) on their own ortheir institution’s Website. I am not aware that thosepublishers who agree to this have seen any damage totheir journals; if anything, it probably achieves in-creased visibility. Indeed, some publishers are provid-ing authors with PDF files for this purpose. For somesubjects there are well-established preprint archives towhich authors may have submitted their work in ad-vance of publication; while some publishers refuse toconsider such articles for their journals, many now ac-cept them and may consider a reference to the pub-lished version to be good publicity. The proposed“e-print” archives, such as PubMed Central, whichwill contain final published versions of articles in asingle database, might constitute a more serious threatto journals; publishers are, I suspect, adopting a “wait-and-see” policy.

These days it is essential that the publisher isgranted the requisite rights (and keeps good records toprove such if necessary). Recent legal cases, such as

Tasini

, have demonstrated the importance of this whenmounting journal content electronically. In the UnitedKingdom, arrangements with the Copyright LicensingAgency for obtaining photocopying and digitizationlicences mean that an arbitrary division of journal li-censing income will be made unless the publisher candemonstrate that it “owns or controls” the necessaryrights.

But what rights does the publisher actually need?Clearly, they need the right to publish in print and, in-creasingly, electronic format; this should be an exclu-sive right to avoid both competition and potential con-fusion (e.g., duplicate publication, which is anathemato the scientific community). They also need the rightto grant licenses to other people (such as the CopyrightClearance Center and similar bodies). Publishers haveoften argued that they need copyright—to protect theirand the author’s rights in case of any infringement and

to simplify the processing of permissions requests. Itis, however, possible, with the author’s permission, toact on his or her behalf in defense of copyright as wellas the processing of permissions requests. Some arguethat this makes the registration of copyright in theUnited States more complex, or that it makes the print-ing of copyright lines on each page more difficult.Nevertheless, it is hard to find a justification, otherthan convenience, for insisting on taking ownership ofthe author’s copyright.

There are two ways of satisfying authors’ wisheswhile still protecting the interests of the journals inwhich they publish. Either the publisher can acquirecopyright but explicitly grant back to the author all therights outlined above, or the author can retain copy-right and grant the publisher a “licence to publish.”While there are numerous examples of copyright as-signment documents, there are few models availableof a grant of license. The ALPSP therefore spent sometime in late 1999 drafting just such a model document;we took advice from our extensive Copyright Com-mittee, which includes several lawyers, and otherexperts. The initial version has received helpful, andlargely favorable, comments from the academic com-munity, although we are always interested in furtherfeedback. The document is not necessarily intended tobe copied verbatim, but rather used as source materialfrom which publishers can draft their own versions(several, we understand, are already intending to doso). The model document can be found on the ALPSPWebsite: www.alpsp.org.uk/grantli.pdf. It has alsobeen adopted for use in our journal,

Learned Publish-ing

. In response to comments from those publisherswho are not willing to relinquish copyright, a “copy-right assignment” version is also in preparation.

A seminar was held in London in January 2000,shortly after publication of the above document, todiscuss “Who Should Own Copyright in Journal Ar-ticles?” Our academic speakers were strongly sup-portive of the ALPSP model Grant of Licence, andeven those publishers who still felt the necessity to ac-quire copyright were generally willing to allow the au-thor all the other rights that it enshrines. An interestingissue that emerged, however, was whether universitiesor their academic employees actually own the copy-right for those employees’ articles. Of course, com-mercial companies have long exercised this right. UKand US law both suggest that the universities do, infact, own the copyright, provided the writing is done“in the course of employment.” This presents fertileground for a variety of interpretations, although some

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university contracts of employment now make it ex-plicit that they own the copyright for everything theemployee writes. In the past, universities have at-tempted to insist on this right, although in the UnitedKingdom at least this appears to have subsided. It maybe that universities have found it inadvisable to antag-onize their employees in this way for little or no eco-nomic benefit—some academics have even claimedthat “academic freedom” could be threatened. In manycases the situation is complicated by multiauthorshipfrom different institutions, or by authors who move toanother institution during the course of publication.And one has to ask what the universities would actu-ally do with the copyright—grant it (or a license topublish) to publishers? It seems unlikely that theywould re-embark on the evolution of universitypresses, which often started as outlets for their ownmembers’ work, but sooner or later discovered thatthis was neither helpful to readers (and, therefore, to

authors) nor a good way to run a business on behalf ofthe university. It may well be that the battle is movingaway from “authors versus publishers” to “authorsversus universities”!

The importance of copyright to authors may be asmuch psychological as legal, but that is not to belittlethe author’s feeling of ownership of the work created.If publishers can find a way of respecting this wish,without damaging their own business, then I can thinkof no good reason why they should not do so.

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Sheridan Brown and Alma Swan,

What Authors Want: TheALPSP Research Study on the Motivations and Concernsof Contributors to Learned Journals

(Association ofLearned and Professional Society Publishers, 1999).