Copyright for Chemists: Promoting Reuse through Open Licensing

This article explains why you might want to be concerned about reuse of your scientific work and ways you can help ensure that it takes place. Licenses: Selectively Transfer Some of Your Rights Governments grant citizens the right to control how their works are reused through copyright. As scientists, these rights are extended to you every time you publish a paper. Although many organizations such as ACS Publications insist on extracting exclusive copyright from authors as a condition for publication, there is a better way. As a copyright holder, you can license your work. In doing so, you retain all ownership rights but permit only those you choose to duplicate your work and only in the manner you specify. As a specific example, you may have noticed the upper-right image in many Depth-First posts. These were not created by me, but rather photographers around the world who make their pictures available under a license that gives me the right to combine their work with my own. Without such a license, I wouldn't even consider using these images in the manner I do. Modern information technologies like the Web have opened up vast new possibilities to combine large numbers of scientific papers for automatic indexing and mining. But these efforts can only happen within the boundaries of copyright law. Those chemists who fail to grasp the significance of copyright as it applies to their research documentation may find themselves unable to gain recognition for their hard work ...
Source: Depth-First - Category: Chemists Authors: Source Type: blogs