Another reason to avoid commercial journal publishers

Regrettably, it's not just commercial journal publishers that are obnoxious about such things. While I haven't heard of them actually sending any takedown letters, I have looked at the copyright assignment forms for a professional organization (which I shall decline to name) and found them to be startlingly inflexible towards the authors. And this was for conference papers, not journal articles.

(Ironically, Elsevier is actually pretty reasonable about the author-permissions thing, despite being commercial.)

Good point. And the last time I blogged about journal publisher misbehavior, a professional organization was one of the culprits too.

Thanks for bringing attention to this, I could have missed it otherwise.

Stunning.

You're welcome! Though it hit Slashdot today, so I suspect you'd have plenty of opportunity to learn about it elsewhere as well...

I wonder if it would be useful to have some kind of wiki where we could discuss the copyright policies and past actions of various publishers w.r.t the level of freedom the authors have and summarize them all in a single table with a couple of lines for each journal. Do you know of any such thing? The idea would be that if you're planning to submit somewhere and make sure you don't want to fall into a copyright trap you can look it up without having to read legalese.

I used to have some bookmarks on this, but I'm not sure where I put them. The links on the Wikipedia open access article might be a good starting place.

It seems that the issue has been resolved. The director of publications of SCI (Society of Chemical Industry) claimed that this was just a misunderstanding...

http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/04/victory_a_happy_resolution.php

Thanks, I added the same link at the end of my post not long before seeing your comment.