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Nature lets authors keep copyright

Posted by chrisd on from the science-is-good dept.

oever writes "In the latest issue of Nature, it says that the copyright for all articles published by the Nature Publishing Group will remain with the article's authors. (I guess I'll have to publish in Nature from now on.) However, to publish an article in Nature, you still have to agree on some limitations with respect to publishing the article in other media. For example, you can put a PDF on you webpage but it's not allowed to add the article to an archive (Google cache?)."

6 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Finally by guerby · · Score: 4, Informative
    The Nature grant of some rights is a joke, see below from the FAQ. You have no right to reuse your own article excepted in printed paper form, yeah. The way is still long until science and public interest recovers from these thieves...

    How can I show my article to my colleagues?

    By sending a link to the paper on your website. You may not distribute the PDF by email, on listservs or on open archives. Please remember that although the content of the article is your copyright, its presentation (i.e. its typographical layout as a printed page) remains our copyright.

  2. Interpretation. by Xner · · Score: 4, Informative
    You have no right to reuse your own article excepted in printed paper form, yeah.

    It might be me, but I see nothing of the kind in the license. What I do see however are the magic words "Ownership of Copyright remains with the authors", provided that when reproducing the contrubution the journal is acknowldged and referenced.

    It is not entirely clear to me why the Authors should need to retain any "non-exclusive rights" since they are still the owners of the copyright. My guess is that they left it in from the previous version for clarity.

    The restrictions on the reproduction of the original PDF and printed paper stem from the fact that the typesetting constitutes a derivative work by the Nature Publishing Group. You are however free to distribute your contribution to the paper (without nature's formatting, e.g. re-latexing it) in whatever way you please. As far as I can tell, it is completely unencumbered.

    --
    Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man
  3. Re:Finally by Zocalo · · Score: 4, Informative
    I think you missed a point (or I have) as the "distribute the PDF by email..." bit is a bit vague - what does "the PDF" mean, exactly? The text of the article submitted as a PDF, or a PDF of the pages actually in the printed Magazine? There's a big difference.

    What I think Nature is saying is that you retain copyright of the article, and presumably any illustrations you submitted, but Nature retains copyright of the layout and any illustations they added. This seems perfectly fair to me, provided that it does indeed mean that I could post the ASCII representation, or even my own layout, of my article to all and sundry.

    There is also the "fair use" issue of photocopying articles in publications of course, but that's another point, and the restrictions there are pretty well known.

    --
    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
  4. "no archive" by g4dget · · Score: 4, Informative
    Publishing has a notion of "archival publication". Traditionally, if several libraries held copies, it was archival. Today, that function is also fulfilled by services like Arxiv.ORG. An archival publication can be cited as such. Nature probably wants to avoid that there are multiple archival copies of a paper.

    I'm not sure I like the restriction, but at least I can understand why a traditional publisher or librarian might want to impose it.

    The Google cache shouldn't be a problem, and Citeseer shouldn't be a problem either (it doesn't try to be archival, as far as I can tell).

  5. IANAL, however... by Spock+the+Baptist · · Score: 3, Informative

    After reading the NPG's License to Publish I believe that the author/s of articles submitted to NPG do not give up the copyright to the words, figures, and tables which were submitted by the author/s, but merely the copyright of the layout of the article published by NPG.

    In other words you can take the words, figures, and tables that you submit, and rearrange them and then republish them, and be in the clear as far as NPG is concerned.

    --
    "Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
  6. Peer-Reviewed Journals by jat2 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Non-exclusive transfer of copyright is not unheard of in the world of peer-reviewed journals. Personally, I am an applied mathematician, and I (and many colleagues) have had articles published in the SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) journals. They have a simple non-exclusive transfer of copyright that allows the authors to retain all their copyright priviledges, including the right to make your work publicly available. Furthermore, the SIAM people provide editing services, and send you back the LaTeX source for the final draft, which you can then compile (to pdf, ps, dvi, etc) and post on your web site.

    Of course, SIAM is a nonprofit research and teaching professional organization. All journals are peer-reviewed, at very little cost to the society. However, since I completed my Ph. D., I have been strongly considering refusing to submit my original research to any journals that do not offer similar non-exclusive copyright transfers. While I was working on my Ph. D., my advisor had a great deal of say as to which journals we submitted.

    It may seem like an obvious thing to do (i.e., submit to an "open" peer-reviewed journal). However, most young researchers are looking for tenure, and get tenure (at predominantly research oriented schools) by having many of their articles published in top-tier journals. Unfortunately, this openness is rare among the top-tier journals. (SIAM is an exception.)