Subject: CCL:Legal issues about stuff put under Mosaic

From: [email-masked] (Lothar Koniczek)
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 16:01:42 +0100 (NFT)

-Dr Henry Rzepa writes:
>
>-leif laaksonen writes:
>
>>
>>We have been running a WWW server here for some time in biochemistry,
>>computational chemistry and mathematics. I have been fascinated by the
>>possibilities Mosaic has. To make the information setup as complete
>>and good as possible I have also put up some of my publications.
>>
>>The question is now. Do I have the right to make the text and figures
>>from my publications publicly available through Mosaic? When a manuscript gets
>>accepted we usually have to sign the paper where we give the rights to
>>publish the manuscript to a publisher.
>>
>>Could somebody explain me which rights we are giving away to the publisher?
>>Are the publishers very strict about this issue? For me it sounds very
>>strange if we have agreed to give away the "words" and information in our
>>publications. Or are we just prohibited to use the layout and setting in which
>>the manuscript gets published in a journal?
>
>
>The short answer is that every paper has to be analysed on a per
>case basis. In my own publishing of RSC material, I asked permission
>to mount it purely as a pilot project, with no committment from the
>RSC involved. They were kind enough to grant me this permission,
>although also making it clear that this permission was not generic.
>I gather a more formal statement will be included in the instructions to
>authors in due course. Another publisher gave me the more formal
>answer "they reserved the right to all electronic storage and distribution
>rights" to the material I had submitted to them. I am still waiting
>clarification if this means that I cannot store the papers on floppy or
>hard disk.
>

Hm, have you thought about rewriting the text without changing the meaning
of the paper. Well, it seems to me that some scientists write articles
which have the same contents and are published in different journals.

From a different point of view, the restriction of publishing an article
in only one journal serves as a garantee too, that there will be only
ONE citation possible. Just imagine that you have written an
article about superconductivity, published for example in
J. phys. soc......
then you will put a copy on 
URL: http://netweb.anywhere.net/publish/article.html
So this can be cited twice:
 [1] Superconductivity, H. Rzepa, J. phys. soc........
 [2] Superconductivity, H. Rzepa, http://netweb.anywhere.net/publish/article.html

To a lot of readers it may occur, that you have written two different
articles concerning superconductivity.
Well, i think one should think about where to publish an article, cause
the WWW is a publishing media same as a scientific newsletter.

As a matter of fact you have three choices:
  1.) Put a message on a Web-Server where to find your published article
  2.) Rewrite your article for the Web
  3.) Write an article and publish it ONLY via Web, but have in mind
      that not all scientists have access to the Web or even know
      of it.

Please, don't misunderstand me. This is not critics or even a flame.
These are just my thoughts to this subject. Anyway it will be a nice
idea setting up a Web-Server for scientific publications.

KEYBOARD FAILURE
PRESS ANY KEY TO RESUME                       ---IBM

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| Name:		Dipl.-Chem. Lothar Koniczek				   |
| Working at:	University of Dortmund (Germany) / Department of Chemistry |
| E-mail:	[email-masked]			   |
| Voice:	+49 0231 755-3891					   |
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From: [email-masked] (kr)
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 16:51:15 -0800

At 16:21 3/16/94 +0200, [email-masked] wrote:
>It's very true that quite a lot could be published (distributed) already
>without a publisher. The key question is (as Henry Rzepa pointed out)
>how the scientific quality of the material could be guaranteed.

For getting inspired by what a world might look like with individual
publishing on a densely inter-knitted hypertext system, where issues of
reputation, reviews, and filtering become of major importance, I recommend
reading chapter 14 "The Network of Knowledge" in "Engines of Creation" by
K. E. Drexler, Anchor/Doubleday, 1986. The remainder of the book is just as
excellent, illustrating what chemistry will be like in the not too distant
future.

The issue of scientific quality of net-published articles can be assured if
mechanisms are put into place whereby people can comment on the quality and
read-worthiness of other papers, and readers will quickly learn to get
their pointers from high quality reviewers, whose judgment they trust.

Greetings
Markus Krummenacker