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. As for a complete copyright share - personally that sounds fine to me, but one could argue that if the same work was completely free to be published anywhere else then why would anyone want to read the P2PJournal. I'm not sure I totally buy the argument myself, but I think the reason that most academic journals and conferences give for holding on to the copyright of the papers they publish is that if they didn't then they would be unable to maintain their readership or attendees. Whether this is true or not is open to question. There is also a sot of contradiction in terms of having a P2PJournal with restrictive copyright rules - but then such is life. Let us see what we can evolve. CHEERS> SAM David Gvthberg wrote:

I checked out your "writer's guidelines" and was somewhat shocked. You state that after accepting submission of a paper to your journal, the journal (that is Raymond F. Gao, Editor-in-Chief) gets the copyright of the submitted text.

That's pretty silly especially since you don't even pay for the work and expect people to write about their inventions and research.

When my mother hired an artist to do the pictures to her children's books we used a much better way: We signed a contract stating a "split" or "shared" copyright. That is, both the artist and my mother can do what they want with the pictures. Thus both parties can reprint them, sell them and use them in any way they see fit and booth are happy!

I suggest you should do the same, or people like me will never bother to write for your journal. Among other things, your "rule" makes it impossible to send you texts that one has already published in other places and your rule makes it impossible to reuse that material as one sees fit. If I write about my inventions I of course want to be able to reuse any text I write about them. But writing for you is a one time thing and thus not worth the effort.

And don't just say: "This is how it is normally done." Just because it's common to do like that it doesn't make it right.

But I do like the thought of a p2p journal!

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