[Open-access] scholarly articles still not in OA. What could we do?

[Marcin Wojnarski]

... to be more specific.
Germany, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Spain... apply or used to apply the 
same rule as Poland in respect to "future fields of exploitation", 
namely disallowing copyright transfer on fields of exploitation unknown 
at the time of the contract. Source: this book 
<http://books.google.pl/books?id=03GwJ17bt-QC&pg=PA126&lpg=PA126&dq=future+forms+of+exploitation+copyright&source=bl&ots=rXNAKBeSDm&sig=RdcibHxNN8oCeBpt4SVjj8eXG0g&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-ArsUq2zAYO0hAe7soHYCg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=future%20forms%20of%20exploitation%20copyright&f=false>, 
sect. 3.2.5.

Therefore, all publications governed by law of these countries and 
published before internet era belong to respective authors as far as 
online use is concerned. Note that this includes publications by one of 
the biggest publishers, Springer. I looked into copyright transfer 
agreement that I had to sign a few years ago with Springer - it states 
that it's governed by German law, so I suspect that all past Springer 
publications are governed by German law, too.

Marcin


On 01/31/2014 09:13 PM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote:
> That's wonderful!
> In Polish copyright law, there has been always the concept of "fields 
> of exploitation" of a creative work. For the transfer of copyright to 
> be legally correct and binding, all intended fields of exploitation 
> must be explicitly named in the contract between author and publisher. 
> If a given field is not specified, copyright is not transfered for 
> this field of use. Moreover, it's not allowed to use general 
> statements like "all fields of exploitation" or "all future fields of 
> exploitation" - this is incorrect and has no legal effect. For a 
> reference, see: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Polish_Copyright_Law 
> (Article 41, p. 2 & 4) or 
> http://www.artserwis.pl/index.php?f=1&fgid=1&fqid=23 (in Polish).
>
> Now, internet and digital distribution is a new, separate field of 
> exploitation. But in contracts signed before internet era, say until 
> 90s, this field couldn't have been specified, so all those contracts 
> are valid only for traditional forms of use of the work and not for 
> the web. Thus, for internet use, copyright to these publications still 
> belongs to respective authors and not to publishers. :)
>
> That's how it works in Poland. It can be different in other countries.
>
> Marcin
>
>
> On 01/31/2014 04:46 PM, Tom Olijhoek wrote:
>> Isn't it the case that for everything published before 1999 the 
>> copyright does not apply to any electronic version?
>>
>> Tom

-- 
Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIT
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