APS Self-Archiving Policy Clarified Stevan Harnad 08 May 2000 12:48 UTC
Thomas J. Walker <tjw@GNV.IFAS.UFL.EDU> wrote: > > The APS does not seem to allow the posting of its PDF files On Fri, 5 May 2000, Mark Doyle [APS] <doyle@aps.org> replied: > (3) The right, after publication by APS, to use all or part of the article > and abstract, without revision or modification, in personal compilations > or other publications of the author's own works, including the author's > personal web home page, and to make copies of all or part of such > materials for the author's use for lecture or classroom purposes, > provided that the first page of such use or copy prominently displays > the bibliographic data and the following copyright notice: > ``Copyright (year) by The American Physical Society.'' > > Authors may post their PDF files on their own sites, not on e-print servers. To summarize: It has now been clarified (by both the APS Editor in Chief, Marty Blume, and the APS Product Development Manager, Mark Doyle) that not only does APS copyright policy indeed allow its authors to self-archive the authors' own (home-brew) final, refereed, accepted drafts anywhere on the Net (as long as they're for free and cite the APS official published version), but it even allows the APS's own proprietary PDF page-images of the paper to be self-archived on the author's own site. Let me repeat: This is MORE than I (for one) ever asked for, and certainly more than is needed to free the refereed literature for one and all, TODAY, through open self-archiving, if all publishers made it clear to authors that they have the same policy as the APS. (Note that the refereed literature can be freed today, legally, even if publishers do NOT adopt the APS policy, but author-uncertainty about this is currently still holding us back from the optimal and the inevitable; so the explicit statement of APS-equivalent policy would be a great help in hastening the day, by decisively dispelling this uncertainty.) http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html So please, contributors to the American Scientist Forum, do not cite or interpret any of the minor APS constraints on self-archiving as in any way at variance with either the letter or the spirit of the movement to free the refereed literature, now. [I hope it won't be considered churlish of me to add, even in the warm and welcome light of the APS's enlightened and progressive policy, that in the era of Santa-Fe-compliant, interoperable, open-archives, the distinction between an author's "own site" and an "e-print server" simply dissolves: All I have to do is adopt Santa-Fe-compliant open-archiving software at my home site, register it as an open archive, and it will be harvested into the seamless global virtual archive that interoperability makes possible, along with all the other open home-archives, by any of the search-engines keying on, say, the agreed metadata tag for "REFEREED"...] http://www.openarchives.org/ http://www.eprints.org/ Public archiving is public archiving, freely accessible to all, no matter how you baptize your website. That is the nature of the Web, once the cat's out of the bag... Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org