But there clearly remain some questions – I also do think that Mike Otsuka’s question needs to be answered. And I would add that Michael Brintnall’s claim that APSA does hold the copyright seems to be in contradiction with what jamie (#13) found out from his lawyer.

If APSA does indeed hold the copyright, then there may not only be the problem that Thom Brooks pointed at, but also that authors cannot request to remove papers when they no longer want to have them on-line. Henry seems to be more concerned about how to have stable links, but others, including myself, are more concerned with keeping control over what is being circulated.

I don’t think we’re there, yet.

This leads me to completely to agree with Mike that Brintnall must justify APSA’s policies on this issue. My sense—-perhaps others will agree—-is that there simply is no justification.

What’s worse, of course, is that if someone holds copyright to your draft APSA paper and you submit the paper and have it accepted elsewhere, well, you may not get it published unless APSA consents as they, not you, own the rights to your own work. Disgusting.

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.

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

It is appalling, though, that I HAVE e-mailed them twice before, asking them to remove the papers, but without making any reference to a possible violation of copy rights—and that they didn’t even bother to reply.

Henry: I am an APSA member as well, and would be happy to write/sign any joint letter about this.

“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.