Further Light and Knowledge

I work for a small engineering consulting firm that occasionally publishes case histories and analytical methods in academic or professional organization publications. We just redesigned our website and as part of the site, we wanted to electronically distribute the publications from our new website of which staff members were authors. We got cold feet at the last second out of fear of violating copyright.

I understand that as authors, we hand over copyright to the publishers, but do we really give up all ability to distribute our original work? In our case, it is usually not the hard science publishers like Elsevier that make money from our work, but usually by professional organizations (like the American Society of Civil Engineers) which are non-profit, member-supported organizations.

My question to the academic authors and lawyers out there; what are your experiences with electronic distribution of papers by authors without the involvement of the publisher and has legal action been perused against authors by academic publishers? I understand that we would be violating copyright using a strict interpretation of the law, but are we really at risk of legal action beyond a nasty-gram cease and desist letter?

University of Kansas has ust decided to make all scholarly publications by their faculty available online. You should contact the office in charge and see what they're doing about the copyright.

Did you actually sign something that handed over sole copyright ownership to the publisher? I would be surprised if a non-profit publisher would have asked you or required that you sign over the copyright for your original work.

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Gospel in Action

Every Wrong Move

Thanks for the tip. Their pages provided a good primer on copyright. I may give them a call.



I don't believe that we have actually signed something, but was more of an "if you submit this for publication, it is ours forever ... muwuhahahah". Do we need to explicitly sign it over?

Well, the author owns the copyright. You give the publisher permission to print it. That in itself doesn't take the copyright away from you. Was there some sort of agreement or contract? I'd suspect there'd be something in that.

_________________
Gospel in Action

Every Wrong Move