On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 10:52:12AM +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: (snip)
----- Forwarded message from Sam Joseph <sam@neurogrid.com> -----
From: Sam Joseph <sam@neurogrid.com> Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2003 11:06:08 +0900 To: "Peer-to-peer development." <p2p-hackers@zgp.org> Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] Peer-to-Peer Journal (P2PJ) CFP Organization: NeuroGrid http://www.neurogrid.net/ User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ja-JP; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 "Peer-to-peer development." <p2p-hackers@zgp.org>
Hi David,
Although I agree with you about the copyright issue, I think that this kind of thing is pretty common with academic journals. I'm not saying that makes it right, but it is true. Every time I get a paper published in a book or journal I have to sign away my rights to the paper.
It is a wonderful little earner for the academic publishing industry generally. They have academics working for free to generate the content, and then they charge other academics to get access to the journal. I think it is another one of those fucked up things that we can't do very much about. However I would imagine that the publishers of academic journals would say that there is such low readership that without free content and exorbitant fees to libraries the entire thing would not be profitable, i.e. they couldn't make enough money to pay the people who work to actually print the journal. At the moment P2PJournal is not making any money, is not charging you to read the journal, and everyone is putting in their time for free. As it happens I have yet to have any say in the copyright issues. I'm working on trying to get the P2PJournal to serve the best interests of the P2P community. I will pass on your comments to the Editor-in-chief.
BTW, I think the standard deal with most journals is that you can publish the work on your own personal website as well - but it would be good to make that explicit.
Unless things have changed in the last few years, that's not true. When I was at the Biomedical Library in Mobile, we had to make very sure that profs there had gotten *written* permission to put their previously published papers on their websites (which we ran for them), and even pictures of book covers. It most definitely wasn't automatic, at least not with most publishers. (rest snipped) -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com