Papers for sale

Well you can download the final version of the Arneson paper, for free, from “his website”:http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/ . I bet that’s true of many of the others.

Inquire about copyright and distribution before agreeing to contribute. Professional societeies are NOT benign publishers– not as bad as Elsevier, maybe. Book chapters are the worst, in my experience.

In the old days, before electronic submission, there was standard language we were supposed to use on the cover page of all APSA papers that did assign copyright to the association for purposes of sale or distribution as conference proceedings. That took the form of the Panel Paper Room, where attendees (only) could buy the papers for a buck apiece. (I miss it. I quite liked it, and could browse a few thousand titles much faster than I can do online.) I’m sure that during the switch to electronic submission, APSA shifted that language or something like it into the terms of submission, so that when we click on the ‘agree’ or ‘submit’ box it’s included in a page of footnoted text nobody reads.

I don’t like it either; but I’d be shocked if they didn’t have their legal bases covered.

APSA obliges its annual meeting-participants to submit their papers prior to the meeting, as a condition of participation.

Well, yes and no. I know a good number of people who have simply never done this since the shift to electronic submission. They circulate to discussants and fellow panelsist and maybe even bring hard copies with them to the panel. The obligation seems to be entirely notional. That’s part of why I miss the paper room; almost everyone did that. Participation in the electronic equivalent seems much, much lower.

Forget about a letter from a lawyer. Write to their web host’s DMCA contact (whois should tell you who their web host is). Take a random letter from chillingeffects.org, and replace the facts with relevant ones. Their web host will yank at least the paper off the web.

I would say that this is a good reason to hammer hard on the APSA in coming years. First, I don’t think they should be exerting copyright at all, but members should certainly hold them to a very limited usage if they grant the association rights to publish. I certainly would object myself if I found a professional association re-selling off publishing rights to work presented at a conference as in this case. It’s one thing when a professional association has an established publication practice itself, or seeks a new vendor to partner with–another when it takes it upon itself to allow the republication of work given at a meeting without reseeking permission from authors.

I’m not a lawyer, but I asked one about this — a copyright expert, in fact — and he pointed me to Section 204(a) of the Copyright Act of 1976:

“A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner’s duly authorized agent.”

I explained the circumstances to the expert, and he agreed that this means that unless Ingrid (et al.) signed a transfer agreement, the APSA doesn’t actually own the copyright to the papers.

I meant to include this in my previous post – a quote from the email I got back: “All of the authors of the papers maintain
the copyright, and always have the right to have their papers removed if
needed.”

Everyone,

This is Michael Brintnall. I’m the APSA Executive Director. The annual meeting papers are not meant to be sold, and All Academic is taking them down. It was a mistake that caused them to be up for sale at that site, and we regret it.

The papers are on-line at http://www.politicalscience.org as part of the PROl initiative. This is an open-access site, operated as a collaboration of APSA and a large number of other political science associations. It’s an extension of APSA’s PROceedings site, where papers are posted for each annual meeting, and it brings together scholarship from a host of other annual meetings too. It’s a good place to search for early scholarship, and I encourage you to use it. All-Academic is the contractor that we use to set up the site. There was some recent confusion about their including our papers in their own for-sale data base. None of the papers from the politicalscience.org project is meant to be at the All Academic site for sale and they are removing them.

APSA does hold the copyright on papers presented at the conference. We count on scholars presenting at the meeting to post their work; and the Council is right now considering ways to increase the response to this. I hope this hiccup with All Academic doesn’t fuel any cynicism about making early scholarship like this available on an open access basis – it’s the purpose of the politicalscience.org project, and it’s what academic discourse is about.

And if anyone was trying to contact APSA on this or anything else and didn’t get a response from us, I really apologize. You can always contact me directly at brintnall@apsanet.org

Michael Brintnall

Michael Brintnall writes: “APSA does hold the copyright on papers presented at the conference. …I hope this hiccup with All Academic doesn’t fuel any cynicism about making early scholarship like this available on an open access basis [which is] what academic discourse is about.”

Cynicism is fueled by the APSA’s continued insistence on transfer to it of the right to profit from the author’s work as a condition of presenting at a meeting. If all the APSA wants to do is to provide open access to — rather than profit from — this work, it doesn’t need to hold the copyright. All it needs to do is to make posting on the open-access site a condition of presenting at an APSA meeting.

Especially since the APSA’s copyright policy is among the legitimate concerns that have been raised in this thread, it would be useful for Michael Brintnall to justify rather than merely assert the APSA’s policy regarding copyright.

P.S. As an executive board member of the UK’s Political Studies Association, it is perhaps worth noting that the PSA allows authors to retain copyright for their conference papers and it does not sell papers either.