The copyright of this post is held by the author

March 29, 2006 4:27 PM

In a few academic papers I've seen, instead of the usual ACM/IEEE copyright blurb, it just says "Copyright held by the author". What's the significance of this? Can anyone just replace the ACM copyright with their own? Does it affect the paper's acceptance rate? Does the conference or journal approve of this?
posted by lpctstr; to Education (8 answers total)

Was the paper already published? I don't know of any major academic publisher which allows the author to retain copyright.

Of course, if the paper were, for example, on a preprint server (like arxiv.org), then all bets are off.
posted by JMOZ at 4:33 PM on March 29, 2006

Response by poster: yes, published. stored on the acm digital archives.

example:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=986106

but I've seen a handful
posted by lpctstr; at 4:36 PM on March 29, 2006

If the ACM held the copyright, the original author could not publish the paper anywhere else, not even on their own web site, without permission from the ACM.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 4:43 PM on March 29, 2006

Best answer: In special cases where an author or author's employer must retain copyright, or when ACM does not wish to give its imprimatur to a particular work, ACM may accept a release from the owner that grants ACM the permission it needs to publish the work.
posted by shoesfullofdust at 5:03 PM on March 29, 2006

Trying to retain copyright can impede publishing if the journal publisher gets sticky about it. Better journals will suck it up if you ask nicely, but some will not. I'd rather not name names, if you don't mind.
posted by bonehead at 6:51 PM on March 29, 2006

Some publishers of conference proceedings do not require copyright transfer, though the ones I know about are very small presses (e.g. cascadilla press). I don't know how widespread this is.
posted by advil at 7:20 PM on March 29, 2006

I don't know about the ACM. In mathematics, where there are no page charges, nor payment of authors/editors/referees, it's not uncommon for authors to simply cross out the copyright stuff they don't like.
Supposedly the copyright stuff is there in order to grant the publisher the legal right to defend the author against illicit copying. Which is to say, they can't represent you unless you grant them the right. It's pretty moronic for academic papers, where dissemination is the very goal.
I've seen estimates that a journal makes $10-$20K off a single math paper, so telling the author "we refuse to publish your paper without you turning over the copyright" is them throwing that money out the window. But apparently some journals do exactly that!
posted by Aknaton at 8:47 PM on March 29, 2006

The Machine Learning community revolted a few years ago against Kluwer. The claims were that the journal, "Machine Learning" (one of the top journals in the field), was too expensive and had a copyright policy that was too restrictive. Considering that the point of publishing is to get people to read your papers rather than make Kluwer money, they had a massive editor exodus. Almost all the significant editors left the journal and formed a new online journal, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). While this journal is primarily online it does have a print version. One of the things thats done differently in this new journal is that the authors retain full copyright of their papers and only give the journal the right to disseminate it. Since its formation JMLR has become the top journal in Machine Learning.
posted by blueyellow at 4:49 AM on March 30, 2006