Weblication & Future Publication

[JQ Johnson]

Patricia F Anderson asks about weblication and copyright law, and provides 
lots of useful references.  A couple of additional thoughts:

As Eric Hellman notes, the answer is very discipline-specific.  I think 
it's actually very journal-specific or editor-specific.  For example, APA 
in Psychology has a restrictive policy, but individual APA journal editors 
often have very unrestrictive policies.  It's also changing very rapidly as 
different editors grapple with the issues.

My own feeling is that the clear trend is towards less restriction on prior 
informal sharing of research results, and the inclusion of unreferreed 
weblication as something allowed by more and more journals.  Journals that 
don't follow this trend are at risk of becoming irrelevant.  But we have 
several years before the dust will settle on these issues -- and a good 
chance that in the process of settling that dust we'll see a radical change 
in the landscape of academic publishing.

I don't believe that "publication" as defined in copyright law has much of 
anything to do with the issues.  As most readers know, "publication" became 
mostly irrelevant for US copyright with the 1976 copyright act (e.g. 
copyright exists from the moment of fixation, independent of publication). 
At issue is what the journals will accept, i.e. what THEY consider to be 
publication.  Analogous to the issue of who the author is; copyright law 
says one thing, but academic practice (which determines bylines) says 
something completely different.

A particularly hot issue in the next few years may become whether 
dissertation filing (with UMI) constitutes prior publication.  After all, 
UMI puts the dissertations on the web and is even starting to assign ISBNs 
for them.


JQ Johnson                      Office: 115F Knight Library
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