As regular readers of these pages know, the need to pay close attention to publication agreement seems to be increasing. Elsevier recently purchased SSRN and has removed SSRN uploads in instances where it wasn’t certain about whether the author held the right to post the material on SSRN.
Law reviews usually send over a publication agreement after you’ve selected each other and committed to publishing. When I look at these, I generally lack any context to evaluate whether particular requests are industry standard or abnormally restrictive. One potential resource to go to for help is the Authors Alliance. The group aims to enable authors to share their work more broadly.
There is also another interesting project afoot. Berkeley’s Rachael Samberg has begun collecting publication agreements. The goal is to look at what different publications request and put together a picture of standard and non-standard terms. If you want to push back on a particular request, it may be helpful to be able to point out when a proposed copyright agreement strays from the norm. If you’ve got publication agreements, send them to Rachael at: [email protected] with the subject line Publication Agreement.*
*Provided that your agreements are not confidential and you’re able to share them.
Posted by Benjamin P. Edwards on August 4, 2016 at 10:30 AM