[cc-community] Copyrights

Robert Atwood (lists) lists at atwood.org.uk
Mon May 5 20:22:22 EDT 2008


Andrew Rens wrote:
...

> Self plagiarism is a deeply incoherent idea born from the deep anxieties
> generated by  Romantic author mythology.
> 
> On a practical level if you quote your previous academic work in a new
> academic work then you should
> provide references as a courtesy to your readers.

I'd put it a bit 'more' that courtesy to readers, in that not providing 
the reference woudl be unacceptable in a way that's beyond mere 
'discourtesy' . It's also a valuable mechanism for shortening the 
article lenght, if you explained something before you can avoid having 
to repeat the whole explanation when publishing a new result that 
depends upon it :
"As previously explianed [1], the gostok diskins the doshes. As a result 
of the new experiments, we now see that... "

Of course if the works in question are not all single-author works, the 
discussion of whter it's 'self-plagarism' doesn't apply, of course you 
could plagarise your prior co-authors and they shoudl be rightly upset 
if you did so!

But in the context of literary works the idea does seem rather absurd, 
and it is certainly more common for literary works to be single-author 
works.

But with academic journal artiles, you usually do not have much latitude 
for insisting on different licenses, most journals just require a 
copyright transfer and that's that.

  On the other hand, the ability to re-sell the same journal article is 
not a big deal for 99.9+ % of academic articles, whereas that is a very 
big concern for literary works i.e. short stories or novels. Its very 
bad for authors and readers of such works if a publisher owns the 
copyright and just cant be bothered to publish the work .. isnt that one 
of the thigns that got CC started in the first place?









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