Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Science creates 'own mavericks'. Britain's scientific community fuels controversies by shunning colleagues with rebel ideas, research suggests. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition] 8:36:30 PM      Google It!.

PNAS outlines noncommercial use policy. Nicholas R. Cozzarelli et al, Liberalization of PNAS copyright policy: Noncommercial use freely allowed, PNAS Early Edition, August 17, 2004. An editorial describes the rights of PNAS authors (posting .pdf articles, reuse of work in other compilations, etc.,) while justifying PNAS' insistence on copyright transfer, which, Cozzarelli and colleagues argue, enable the publisher to transfer journal material to new and evolving storage formats, "remove the administrative burden of rights and permissions management from authors; and to provide protection from copyright abuse." Interestingly, PNAS initiated this policy in 1993, and when they wanted to include material prior to this date in PubMedCentral, they would have needed to get permission from the authors of the original articles. In the end we proceeded without explicit permission from the original authors or their heirs. We accept the risk in doing so because we believe it is clearly in everyone's best interest. If a copyright holder object, however, we will immediately remove the article from our online collection. [Open Access News] 8:24:27 PM      Google It!.