Below, Laurent Gerby kindly draws attention to the Association for
Computer Machinery (ACM) Interim Copyright [and Self-Archiving] Policy,
which is just fine.
There is a silly sentence at the end of [3] about "redistribution"
which is about as meaningful and as enforceable as the distinction
between (publicly!) self-archiving on a "personal" server vs. a
"public" server. But the clause can do no harm, and if it makes
ACM's Gutenberg-era copyright lawyers happy, it's quite welcome!
As part of a copyright transfer to ACM, the original copyright holders
(authors or authors' employer) retain:
[1] all other proprietary rights to the work such as patent,
[2] the right to reuse any portion of the work, without fee, in future
works of the author's own, provided that the ACM
citation and notice of the ACM copyright are included, and
[3] the right to post their own author-versions of preprints and
revisions, including versions covered by ACM copyright but
not versions downloaded from the ACM Digital Library, in a personal
collection on their own or their employer's server.
Such copies must be limited to noncommercial distributions and
personal use by others and must include (1) the ACM
copyright notice, (2) a full citation (in standard bibliographic
style) to the ACM publication, (3) a hot link (or citation) to
the definitive copy in ACM's Digital Library, and (4) a notice that
the copy is posted by permission of ACM and may not
be redistributed. (See §2.5, §2.6 regarding CoRR, and §3.2.)
[4] the right of an employer that originally owned copyright to
distribute copies of works of its author-employees within its
organization.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2002 11:13:43 +0100
From: Laurent Guerby <guerby_at_acm.org>
To: Richard Stallman <rms_at_gnu.org>, Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>,
Subject: ACM policy on papers and freely available electronic repositories
Hi RMS and Stevan,
I dropped a few emails here and there and got a reply from
Bob Allen <rba_at_Glue.umd.edu> chair of the ACM Publication Board.
He mentioned to me that the CoRR initiative, described at
<
http://www.acm.org/pubs/copyright_policy/>
and <
http://www.acm.org/corr/> has been extended up to June 2002.
In short each SIG is free to experiment and put their papers in
electronic form in a free repository hosted here
<
http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive/cs>, with a perpetual free availability.
The CoRR initiative has been extended in time multiple times, but I
couldn't find where the latest extension has been announced, and it
looks like very few people are aware of it (I asked for an URL but got
no answer).
I have contacted the only SIG where I'm active (SIGAda) and the
officers weren't aware of the initiative but looked enthousiastic, so
they're checking what they can do to help.
So the procedure for someone willing to make his/her own ACM paper
available is to check with their SIG and if it's ok, just put it in the
repository. Same thing applies for past papers.
Stevan, feel free to copy this note (hopefully good news :) to mailing
lists to raise the issue, there are a lot of SIGs in ACM and I can't
contact all of them, and since a new decision will be taken in June,
this can help. People knowing more about ACM management will without
doubt be able to do a much better job than I.
PS: I get a lot of emails, so I could unfortunately have missed replies
to my questions to people in other organisations than ACM.
--
Laurent Guerby <guerby_at_acm.org>
Received on Mon Mar 18 2002 - 13:00:29 GMT