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Publisher Targets Authors for Pirating Their Own Work

posted by martyb on Sunday May 18 2014, @10:45AM   
from the publish-AND-perish? dept.

Fluffeh writes:

The American Society of Civil Engineers is cracking down on researchers who post their own articles on their personal websites. The publisher, which owns dozens of highly cited journals, claims that the authors commit copyright infringement by sharing their work in public. To make their work easier to access, many researchers host copies of their work on their personal profiles, usually hosted by their university. Interestingly, however, this usually means that they are committing copyright infringement.

While many journals allow this type of limited non-commercial infringement by the authors, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) clearly doesn't. The professional association publishes dozens of journals and during the past few weeks began a crack down on "pirating" researchers.

Thanks go to lhsi who also sent news of this article to us.

• Not quite as bad as it sounds (Score: 3, Informative) by Dr Ippy on Sunday May 18 2014, @11:17AM

  by Dr Ippy (3973) on Sunday May 18 2014, @11:17AM (#44829)

  It's not quite as bad as it sounds; the journal owns the copyright to the published article, but usually the authors retain some rights. For example, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) allows you to put up your own version of the paper. This is often done in the form of a "preprint", "preliminary version" or "technical report" whose content is almost identical to that of the published paper, but differently formatted. In other words, the content itself remains the intellectual property of the author and they can do what they like with it, more or less, short of publishing it in another journal.

  I'm outside the USA so I'm not too bothered about American IP laws. I've put most of my publications (including ones from US journals) online at my own website; some of them are scans of the published version. I've never been asked to take anything down, but if I were, I'd replace the link to the paper with an email link: "Email me if you'd like to see this paper." (My email address is already well known to spammers, so meh... .)

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