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"breaking their contract with the publisher" I don't believe this is true, generally. of course, it depends exactly what they email you, but if it is a pre-pri
by tehwalrus 14y ago
"breaking their contract with the publisher"
I don't believe this is true, generally. of course, it depends exactly what they email you, but if it is a pre-print, that is, the PDF you compiled with LaTeX on your laptop, then there is normally no problem.
The publishers only own the copyright to the particular typesetting of the paper (which was originally the useful service they provided academics) and as such, without their special-sauce theme that adds the journal name and page numbers on, it's fine for you to distribute it, host it online for free, etc. (Incidentally, this is also the case with sheet music, which is why it's legal to enter a score into a MIDI program and print it out, but not to photocopy it.)
As I say, this is probably not a universal fact, and will depend on what the terms of the journal submission was, and indeed for the book mentioned there was probably a specific contract at some point. Although, if there were small changes between the book and the thesis, the author was probably within her rights to email (and indeed host online) the thesis for free.
- tbeseda 14y agoSo why don't we make an effort to publish these sorts of pre-prints?
- pjscott 14y agoSome people are making an effort. The ones that spring to mind are http://arxiv.org/ http://arxiv.org/ http://eprint.iacr.org/ http://eprint.iacr.org/ And Google Scholar often turns up pre-prints, making them much easier to find: http://scholar.google.com/ http://scholar.google.com/