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Jan Carmikle Dwyer, Intellectual Property Officer
Technology Transfer Services/TIA/OVCR
University of California, Davis
1850 Research Park Dr Suite 100
Davis CA 95616-6134
Voice: 530-297-4493
Fax: 530-758-3276
Email:
copyright@ucdavis.edu
dmca@ucdavis.edu
Websites: www.research.ucdavis.edu/copyright
www.research.ucdavis.edu/technologies
Although faculty can make and put PDF files of their articles on a website, whether it is legal to do so is an entirely different question. And it's a good question, one I get regularly, so I hope you don't mind if I copy the campus copyright-info listserv.
Under federal law, the copyrights (copy, distribute, make derivative works, perform and display) belong to the author/artist who fixes an original expression in a tangible medium, unless there is a written agreement to the contrary prior to the creation or the work is a “work made for hire,” that is, part of one's employment. Our faculty have an obligation to create scholarly works which would generally make their articles the property of The Regents as works made for hire. However, in the UC Policy on Copyright Ownership (you can find this on the copyright website) The Regents state that they leave the copyright ownership in their faculty authors. So far, so good.
The problem arises from publication. Historically, academic journals require authors to assign their copyrights to the journals in order to be published. Because the articles belong to the individual faculty, they sign their own publication agreements, most likely without truly reading and understanding what they are doing – giving up their copyright ownership. Publish or perish, right? This means that in order to exercise any of the copyrights (see list above) to their own article the faculty author will need the express written permission from the publishing journal. Making a PDF is a derivative work. Putting it on the web (even if obtained from the journal that way as part of the editing process) is making copies and distributing.
Some journal agreements now allow the author to exercise specific copyrights in certain ways; a few journals don't require assignment to be published (law reviews) which would mean the faculty can scan and post away, and even publish elsewhere without permission. To find out whether the author already has the rights necessary to make and distribute copies (including making photocopies to send to fellow faculty, a journal club, or the like) the author needs to check his/her publication agreement. Putting a disclaimer notice on the article isn't enough.
Since the answer is more likely to be that permission is required than not, and because the Internet is neither anonymous nor hard to search, I advise that faculty not put their own articles on the web without checking their agreement and asking/receiving written permission if required.
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