Normally, scientists retain the copyright to their work, but sign an exclusive license to publish the work. Often this license is based on the additional work

Normally, scientists retain the copyright to their work, but sign an exclusive license to publish the work. Often this license is based on the additional work done by the journal (minor proof-reading and formatting), that's why preprint servers always serve the unformatted version (or in the format of the preprint server). For Science, for example: >Authors can immediately post the accepted work to their personal or institutional archive. >The accepted version is the paper that was accepted for publication by AAAS, including changes resulting from peer review, but prior to AAAS copyediting.) Source for Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/contribinfo/prep/license.xhtml http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/contribinfo/prep/lice... Same goes for Nature: >NPG does not require authors of original (primary) research papers to assign copyright of their published contributions. Authors grant NPG an exclusive licence to publish, in return for which they can reuse their papers in their future printed work without first requiring permission from the publisher of the journal. http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html http://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html