Ethical Issues in Scientific Publishing 10-17
Appendix 2: Copyright Copyright establishes the ownership of your written material. Very simply, copyright law protects everything, from the outline and the first rough draft to the manuscript that is finally published. Importantly, the author does not need to take any special action to secure copyright. Up to the time a manuscript is accepted for publication, the authors are the copyright holder. After a manuscript is accepted for publication, authors will generally find that a condition of publication is that they must transfer ownership of the copyright to the owner of the journal. That owner may be a publisher, a professional society, or an institution. In some cases, only the corresponding author, as the official representative of the manuscript, will be asked to sign the form that transfers copyright. Generally, though, all authors must sign because they own the copyright jointly.
Copyright holders have the following rights: The right to reproduce the copyrighted work
The right to prepare derivative works based on the copyrighted work The right to distribute copies of the copyrighted work to the public This means that, after the copyright is transferred to the journal owner, the authors no longer have these rights, and they must get permission from the new copyright holder to do any of these things. If you decide you want to reproduce previously published material — your own or someone else’s — you need to obtain permission to use the material from the copyright owner — the publisher or the society. It may be a block of text from a journal article or book that exceeds a few sentences or a table or a figure in its entirety. Getting permission is simple to do. All you have to do is to send a letter or form requesting permission for republication of the material to the copyright holder specifying 3 things: 1. The material you want to use — that is, the figure, table, or portion of text you want to use. 2. The title of the work that you want to reproduce the material from, the authors or editors of the work, and the page number on which the material appears. Also include a photocopy of the material. 3. The purpose that you are using it for. If the material will be reproduced in a book, name the editors, the title of the book, and the publisher. Once the copyright holder returns the form indicating consent to your request, you will need to include a credit line. Some publishers specify the wording of the copyright line, which you must use. If no wording is specified, the following works well: “Reproduced with permission from [insert full reference].” For more information on copyright, please see “Crash Course in Copyright” at http://copyright.lib.utexas.edu/.
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