[Open-access] Copyright for papers published by US or Commonwealth employees

Tue Apr 29 11:00:08 UTC 2014

Hi Peter,

Interesting finding.
However if there is no claim for copyright by the society there could be a
copyright for the government agency , is it not?
And then it would not automatically mean that the work is free to
distribute or reuse.
But I am no copyright law specialist and people from Creative commons might
know more about this

On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 12:44 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> [posted to Open Definition list as well since they have a lot of
> jurisdiction knowledge]
>
> from a correspondent...
>
> "I have noticed on a few ACS journal papers the following text:
>
> Published by American Chemical Society. Copyright © American Chemical
> Society. However, no copyright claim is made to original U.S. Government
> works, or works produced by employees of any Commonwealth realm Crown
> government in the course of their duties.
>  example :
>
> http://nature.berkeley.edu/ahg/pubs/Chan_etal_JPCC_2014.pdf
>
>
> So it sounds like that there exists no copyright, and therefore the
> ability to freely distribute the text for papers with this statement. The
> odd thing is the inclusion of the Commonwealth in this. Am I interpreting
> things correctly?
>
> Does this include any government worker in the list of authors? For
> example where you have one government employee and four commercial sector.
> Are university employees government, etc?"
>
> PMR: I think this is true for US. I'd welcome the interpretation of
> "Commonwealth" - is this British Commonwealth? Commonwealth of Australia?
> Canada? or all common wealths? and does it apply to (say) Germany? Max
> Planck?
>
> It would be very useful to have a list of territories where this was in
> force
>
> P.
>
> --
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
>
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