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I have two articles published in a conference proceeding which are not accessible on the Internet. The publisher published three selected articles in SCI journals, but the rest of the articles are not available online on any kind of platform except for the list of titles, which was published at the time of the conference.

I want to self-archive the article in a public library (Arxiv etc.) but the conference publisher refused and said that the copyrights belong to the publisher and I cannot make it available on any other platform.

In the given situation, how can I make my work available to the research community?

Wrzlprmft
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Mohaqiq
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    This is really weird. They keep the copyright to a bunch of articles that they simply discard? – Cape Code Dec 20 '16 at 08:22
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    You may want to check if there were any clauses in the copyright transfer about them actually publishing the paper (I don't recall if this is something that is commonly found in such agreements). – Tobias Kildetoft Dec 20 '16 at 08:35
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    This is not unusual in certain fields (like applied math). However, it is also common to flaunt the rules by posting a preprint on the arXiv (preferably before publishing it in the conference proceedings) or just posting a preprint on one's personal webpage. My own approach is to just avoid conference proceedings as they are notoriously difficult to access. – David Ketcheson Dec 20 '16 at 08:37
  • @TobiasKildetoft unfortunately I lost the copy right file. – Mohaqiq Dec 20 '16 at 09:15
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    @MBK Ask the publisher for a copy of the agreement. They are bound to provide it to you. – user207421 Dec 21 '16 at 01:18
  • A note if you are based in EU: I think under EU laws, the author can not sign over his/her copyright rights. – valentin Dec 21 '16 at 10:18
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    @valentin Could you try to dig up some reference for this claim? I'd like to read up on this (and had signed over copyrights for many texts within the EU already). – Dirk Dec 21 '16 at 11:51
  • @Dirk: maybe this will help you: http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/docs/studies/etd1999b53000e28_en.pdf and http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/docs/studies/etd2000b53001e69_en.pdf – valentin Dec 21 '16 at 13:00
  • @valentin Thanks for the links. As far as I see, both documents gather all kinds of information on moral rights and their relation to copyright within various countries in the EU. My conclusion is that 1) both are not the same in general 2) the situation is diverse within the EU and also I could not find a claim that one can not sign over copyright. – Dirk Dec 21 '16 at 13:12
  • It's from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_European_Union) , but still, there is a limitation to the copyright law for reproduction by libraries, archives, public institutions for non-commercial use. Maybe you can step on it to have your articles available elsewhere. Most of the answers below seem to direct to plagiarism, which is probably not what you want to do... – BioGeo Dec 21 '16 at 13:30
  • Also, institutions often have lawyers who can help you with issues on copyright, licencing, and other legal matters. Maybe you should contact them first, as they have the expertise to advice you properly and they can translate the documents you have signed to our common language – BioGeo Dec 21 '16 at 13:33
  • @Dirk, from my understanding, in EU, being the author, you hold the copyright and you can grant licenses to use or to enforce you rights. – valentin Dec 21 '16 at 13:57
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    @valentin: You most certainly can transfer copyrights in the EU. However, depending on which EU country you live in, you may not be able to sign away certain "moral rights", such as the right to be recognized as the author of the work. – Ilmari Karonen Dec 21 '16 at 17:36

5 Answers5

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This is a challenging situation to be in. If you have signed over the copyright to the publisher, then you cannot legally redistribute the work without the publisher's authorization. I assume you did not realize the publisher's policy was so restrictive when you first submitted the paper; you might want to make a note to self to take a closer look at author rights before submitting, in the future! (And warn friends and colleagues away from that publisher.)

Copyright protects expression of ideas (e.g. the text and images), not the ideas themselves. Even if you have signed away the copyright to your paper, you are free* to write a new paper on the same ideas, using new text and images. So, I suggest:

  • Write a new version of your paper, without directly copying large parts of the conference paper verbatim. It can be a much shorter version. Include in it a note saying that the version from the conference proceedings is available on request; give your email address so that people can contact you for a copy.
  • You own the copyright to this new work. Post it on your website, on arXiv, anywhere else you like.

This way, people can still learn about the contents of the conference paper, and can contact you if they want you to email the full version, which you can't redistribute online.

* Free, in the sense that no copyright restrictions apply. However, in terms of ethical standards on duplicate publication, if you want to publish a new paper based on the same ideas in another conference or journal, make sure the new venue permits it.

Community
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ff524
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  • Copyright protects expression of ideas (e.g. the text and images), not the ideas themselves. Is this universal in academic publishing? – Orion Dec 20 '16 at 21:44
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    @Orion This is universal in copyright law. – ff524 Dec 20 '16 at 21:46
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    @Orion remember (and this is a common confusion on this site) that copyright law and academic convention are almost entirely unrelated. – Flyto Dec 20 '16 at 22:31
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If you are still working on the topic, I would suggest to wait a little until you have an improved version of your results (if this is possible -- probably easier in applied than in pure sciences). Then it is easier to write a new paper in which you essentially repeat the results of the old paper (not verbatim, but in a different, maybe also improved presentation), cite the old paper and show your new results.

In this way you avoid to have a "double publication", but can show your results to the world.

J Fabian Meier
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  • How can we cite something which does not exist no where (online)? – Coder Dec 27 '16 at 03:30
  • @Coder You should avoid to cite unpublished sources, but it is common to cite sources which only exist in print. They are often available to academics by inter-library loan. – J Fabian Meier Dec 27 '16 at 08:38
  • @Coder: I find your comment pretty strange. You are aware that the practice of citing academic articles predates the internet by a few hundred years and that even today the majority of the world's academic articles are not available online? – Pete L. Clark Mar 10 '17 at 03:53
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What you do right now, is to write a blog post about the article. You may quote the title and give the full bibliographic data of the conference submission to help search engines to find it and you should not copy the article verbatim but rewrite the story in new words. The latter is a good idea anyway since people expect different texts on a blog than in a scientific article.

Dirk
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In computer science it is common to make preprints of papers available online. This is essentially the same paper, but in the version before reviewers' comments were incorporated (if any) and without the publishers styling.

I have also seen this in cognitive science. Sometimes a paragraph in legalese is added to the effect that the current version is a preprint, that it may differ from the published version and that only the published version should be cited.

See for example: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/7021/1/7021_2.pdf

See also the wikipedia entry for 'Preprint'.

Ivana
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    If you've signed over the copyright to the work, then self-archiving preprints is allowed only if the publisher permits it; in this case, the publisher seems to have a restrictive approach to author rights. – ff524 Dec 20 '16 at 22:21
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    Jaywalking isn't "allowed" either. Just post the paper already. – JeffE Dec 21 '16 at 14:06
  • I agree with @JeffE's comment. While it is helpful to know what is legal, it could also be a mistake to take these rules too seriously. In practice, try to doing something that is not obviously flagrant and see what happens. If the publisher contacts you and tells you to take it down, you can go from there. Academic publishers have not gotten rich by suing academics, as they well know. Not trying to put some version of the paper online could do much more damage to you and the rest of the academic world. – Pete L. Clark Mar 10 '17 at 04:02
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Technically, it sounds like you can't because it is not your work anymore.

I would suggest you go back and read what ever it was you signed very, very carefully, and then bring it to the legal department of the institution who funded your work. They usually retain an ownership interest in work they fund and if you are very lucky, it might well turn out that it was never your work in the first place and that you did not have the right to sign away all publishing rights. That might render the publishers contract void (or parts of it anyway) allowing the work to be republished elsewhere.

Failing that, walk away fingers burnt and lessons learnt.

Paul Smith
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  • "They usually retain an ownership interest in work they fund and if you are very lucky, it might well turn out that it was never your work in the first place and that you did not have the right to sign away all publishing rights." Finding out that my published paper "was never [my] work in the first place" would not be lucky; it would be a nightmare scenario. – Pete L. Clark Mar 10 '17 at 04:06
  • Technically the OP can put a draft version of the work on his/her webpage. It just could happen that the publishing company might object to it later. That a publishing company would do anything more severe than tell the OP that they don't want to do further business together seems so improbable to me that claiming this without specific evidence to the contrary seems like bad advice. – Pete L. Clark Mar 10 '17 at 04:09
  • On the other hand, republishing elsewhere seems out of the question by academic ethical standards: the paper already got published in one venue. Some people retain the copyrights to their own papers upon publication; that certainly does not make double publication academically legitimate. – Pete L. Clark Mar 10 '17 at 04:11
  • @PeteL.Clark - The OP's nightmare is worse then you have imagined. They don't own it, they can't tell anyone about it and they can't reproduce it. However, if the OP didn't 'own' it outright, (ie their funder retained an interest) then the OP could not legally have lost all control over the papers as they currently have. This means that the funder may still have the right to publish the work so others can benefit from it instead of it being locked in a black hole. – Paul Smith Mar 13 '17 at 16:09
  • "[T]hey can't tell anyone about it." I have no idea what you're talking about. You didn't respond to "That a publishing company would do anything more severe than tell the OP that they don't want to do further business together seems so improbable to me that claiming this without specific evidence to the contrary seems like bad advice." Also the OP retains the intellectual rights to the work since those rights cannot be transferred. – Pete L. Clark Mar 13 '17 at 17:34
  • If the OP wanted to write a different document describing the same work, place that on her webpage and explain the situation, it seems nuts to think that the publisher can or will object. That's what academia does: we use prior published work, in textbooks, papers, classrooms, etc., often in great detail. I am most certainly free to post lecture notes in which I give X's proof of X's published theorem, and I do so all the time. I wonder what part of academia you're in if you think this is not routine. – Pete L. Clark Mar 13 '17 at 17:37
  • @PeteL.Clark - I am not sure where or how you work, but there is a big difference between quoting (with accreditation) someone elses published work, and reproducing someone elses unpublished work. The work in question is not the OP's anymore. They do not get to chose how or where it becomes available. If the OP followed your advise, they would be in breach of copyright and could be legitimately accused of plagiarism. – Paul Smith Mar 14 '17 at 09:43
  • I work in the department of mathematics at the University of Georgia. "The work in question is not the OP's anymore." The article may not be, but the ideas contained in the article are certainly the OP's. "If the OP followed your advise, they would be in breach of copyright and could be legitimately accused of plagiarism." I disagree with both parts, but vehemently with the last part: talking about other people's work with correct attribution is not plagiarism. Talking about your own work with correct attribution is certainly not plagiarism. – Pete L. Clark Mar 14 '17 at 14:01
  • Two questions: (i) Once again, if you think that an academic would get in trouble for doing this, please provide some evidence of that. (ii) Are you actually in academia yourself? Because you are not making a clear distinction between copyright and intellectual property, and for academics this is a vital distinction. – Pete L. Clark Mar 14 '17 at 14:02
  • @PeteL.Clark - Sorry but you are missing the fundamental point. This work stopped being the OP's when (s)he handed over publication rights to the article describing it. If the new owner publishes it somewhere, then the OP can quote it and/or build on it, just as you could. Until then, it would be the same as you quoting or building on my unpublished solution to the P vs NP problem. No matter what you know about my solution, it is not yours to work on. – Paul Smith Mar 14 '17 at 14:15
  • "Sorry but you are missing the fundamental point. This work stopped being the OP's when (s)he handed over publication rights to the article describing it." No, I vehemently disagree. My work is still my work irrespective of its stage of publication by someone else. " If the new owner publishes it somewhere, then the OP can quote it and/or build on it, just as you could." Please read the question more carefully: the first sentence says that the articles have been published; they are just not available online. – Pete L. Clark Mar 14 '17 at 15:44
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    "Until then, it would be the same as you quoting or building on my unpublished solution to the P vs NP problem. No matter what you know about my solution, it is not yours to work on." That is an absolutely ridiculous claim. First of all: of course I can build on your unpublished work if you make it available to me. If you care to go to http://alpha.math.uga.edu/~pete/papers.html, you'll see that each of my last eight preprints ([40] - [47]) cites unpublished preprints. I can show you thousands of similar citations in published papers.... – Pete L. Clark Mar 14 '17 at 15:50
  • ..Second of all, you are conflating an academic and an academic publisher with two different academics. In particular you seem to be saying An author cannot build on their own unpublished work. That sounds crazy to me. If by some chance you are actually an academic and this position is anywhere close to standard in your academic field, please specify. Otherwise I am forced to conclude that you are giving an answer that has no connection or relevance to academia. – Pete L. Clark Mar 16 '17 at 13:52
  • I apologize for the somewhat insulting part of my last comment, and I rewrote it. However, it is you who are not engaging with the facts of the situation. You suggest that things are impossible in academia, I explain that they are not only possible but common and give specific examples, and then (because I know academia is vast) I ask if there is any academi context in which what you say is correct. I don't understand why you would respond to my comments but not to this. – Pete L. Clark Mar 16 '17 at 13:55