CUP corrects the copyright statement on MH back issues

True to their word, as reported yesterday, CUP has now corrected the copyright statements attached to the back-issues of articles from the journal Medical History.  This recognizes the fact that the copyright of these articles belongs to their authors.

I'm still not sure that it's right to say "Published by Cambridge University Press."  I believe my article was published by University College London, who were the publishers of the journal at the time my article was published in 2007.  Nor is the "published online 17 May 2012" right, since it was published online in 2007 by PMC.  I hope that these issues can also be straightened out.

Current article also (C) its author.

 To my surprise, this change in copyright statement now also applies to articles published this year, 2012, during the period since CUP has taken over the journal.  As mentioned in earlier blogs, the documentation on the CUP pages says clearly that OUP will take possession of the copyright of all articles, whether published Open or Closed Access. Do we have a glitch, or a genuine new policy here?

Authors' expectations

While journals like Medical History disseminate new knowledge and try to achieve fairness for authors and readers, I think we should all be striving for clarity and transparency.

• People trying to read and cite articles should not have trouble working out what they are looking at, or worrying about whether this version is identical to that version, and so on.
• Authors who have written for MH in the past should feel confident that their rights have been respected and their work is clearly and accurately published (whether in print or online) in the manner they expected at the time of publication.
• Authors considering publication in MH in the future should have clear knowledge of the terms under which their papers will be published.  They should be able to answer these questions quickly and easily:
  
  • Will I have to pay for my article to be published?
  • Will the public have to pay to read my article?
  • Will I own the copyright of my article?
  • Can my article be reproduced, sold or re-sold without my consent or without paying me?

My views on some of the key issues above are laid out briefly in my January 2012 blog post Copyright and Open Access.
I have also tabulated these key issues for a number of journals that publish in my field, in the post Some OA journals that publish on South Asia.
What I discovered while assembling that information is that many journals do not provide clear information on these basic issues.  I think this is most often because the editors are simply ignorant of these matters.  This is not the case with CUP, but it appears to me that their policies err in the other direction, and are over-complex and hard for legally-naive academic authors to understand.  In the case of Medical History it is still the case that the document outlining the journal's policies in this matter contains opacities, if not self-contradictions (see next blog post).  Hopefully these will be ironed out soon.

Medical history: CUP breaching author's copyright? (cont.)

In an earlier post, I said I had written to CUP about two issues relating to an article that I wrote and of which I own the copyright,

1. Their website's assertion that they own the copyright of my article, and 
2. That they are bundling my Open Access article in a commercial package. 

Daniel Pearce, Commissioning Editor, HSS Journals at CUP has now written back a friendly and apologetic email letter, saying among other things,

I can confirm that an error has been made [...] in respect to the XML header files which accompany a subset of Medical History articles.  As a consequence, as you identify, our platform is currently displaying the incorrect copyright line for your article.  This is entirely unintentional.  It has never been our intention, and is not our intention now, to claim copyright over your article or the articles of any author in the same position as you.   To put this right we have requested a re-supply of XML as a priority and hope to be in a position to correct the copyright lines on all relevant articles on the live site today.  Naturally, we would like to issue an unreserved apology to you for this mistake.

I'm relieved about this, and glad that it has been possible to clear things up gracefully.
Mr Pearce will be writing to me again next week about question 2, when the people who know about these issues are back in the office.