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

[Timothy Vollmer]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 4:00 AM, Tom Olijhoek <tom.olijhoek at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
>

FWIW unrelated to CC, but seems just like a generic (and somewhat lazy?)
copyright notice. I guess I read it as a blanket notice--although I haven't
looked at whether there are other examples that contain this language
beyond the one Peter originally provided. If I am a reader, I'd want to
know if *this *specific article is not protected by copyright (via Section
105 of U.S. copyright title), not just that the American Chemical Society
might have some articles that fall into that category and to which they
don't claim copyright (and rightly so). And I don't know what the rules are
when there are multiple authors creating a joint work, where some of the
authors might need to waive copyright because they're an employee of the
U.S. Federal government.

tvol



>
>
> 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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>>
>
>
> --
> Tom Olijhoek
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