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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.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 18 2014, @12:39PM
It's not just US IP law -- you have to sign copyright release forms on acceptance, and they detail your rights quite clearly, though I'd add the journals I've published in tend to have special extra clauses for researchers working in the US. In the journals I've published in those rights include publishing a copy of a pre-print on your personal website and on a managed pre-print server (such as arXiv) but do not extend to publishing hard-copy, disseminating to electronic publishing outlets, and in some cases not even on your university's website except on your personal pages.
Right or wrong, the conditions are normally pretty clear. They're also normally pretty flouted in unimportant ways, but if the journals wanted to clamp down a lot of people wouldn't have much leg to stand on.