Subject: Re: CCL:Legal issues about stuff put under Mosaic

From: [email-masked] (Henry Rzepa) (Henry Rzepa)
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 08:53:01 +0000

-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.

Basically, few publishers have really formalised this situation, and
I found that they often do not have a policy they can give you.

In the longer term, we face an interesting situation. If authors do not
get "value for money" from publishers, we could in theory make do
without them entirely! How we as authors handle refereeing,
and "time stamping" of papers then becomes an issue. I would like
to suggest the following

1) Scientific societies continue to handle refereeing [or authors set
up societies to act on their behalf in this capacity]
2) We as authors pay them to do this
3) The papers continue being "free" on the www (ie the cost moves from
journal subscription by readers to the authors. It would nevertheless
have to be a reasonable amount. How about $100? This would
certainly discourage fragmentation!!)
4) Societies issue a "one time" public decryption key. This effectively
"time stamps" the paper, and also ensures that it cannot be tampered
with. This key is the
"quality control" mechanism which ensures the paper has been
refereed
4) The decryption keys are published freely. Anyone can use them
to decode (but not to re-encode) www papers. This would ensure that
students are not penalised, and continue
having free access.
5) After a certain time on the www, papers are archived onto CD-ROM,
which are then made available by scientific societies (at a price perhaps)
6) Someone, if market conditions make it attractive, could offer
printed versions of papers.
7) Someone needs to write all the software to make this happen!
Any offers?

Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY;
[email-masked] via Eudora 2.02, Tel:+44  71 225 8339, Fax:+44 71 589 3869.
From June '94: (44) 171 584 5774, Fax: (44) 171 584 5804
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa.html

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 16:21:03 +0200

Henry Rzepa raised several interesting questions. As it looks to me the
publishers have not made up their mind about the new techniques. Statements
like "they reserved the right to all electronic storage and distribution
rights to the material I had submitted to them" sounds horrifying to me.
I can understand that a publisher owns the rights to distribute the material
in the format THEY have prepared bur everything more than that sounds very
drastic.

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.

The idea about the decryption key sounds interesting. However, I just wonder 
how well it would work in "real world" applications. One other thing comes
here into my mind which has to do with the abuse of the WWW material.
I just wonder how many research applications and publications there will
soon around which have been glued together from files available in 
the WWW space. Some kind of a decryption key could prevent this abuse.

-leif laaksonen

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 16:21:03 +0200

-leif laaksonen

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                                   John Locke