Copyright notes

Notes on Copyright Compliance

We feel that it is important for researchers to share their research, and so we have made our papers available on this webpage. However, in doing so we have taken care to ensure that our postings are in compliance with copyright law. On this page we summarise the basis on which we believe our publications are in keeping with the law. We take copyright issues seriously. If you believe that one or more of the files that we have posted here is in violation of copyright, please contact us. The University copyright page linked to in the footer of all University webpages provides an official mechanism by which you can issue a formal takedown request, but if you want an informal resolution to a concern you can also email Amy and we'll look into it immediately.

Overview

Most outlets that we publish in require that copyright be signed over to the publisher, and for most of those, the publisher has a policy posted on their website that outlines the permissions that are given to authors to self-archive their work. The following publishers have policies of this kind:

Some outlets that we publish in require that copyright be transferred, but do not have author rights policies specified at the level of the publisher. In such cases, permissions must be determined at the level of the journal, or groups of journals that are all covered by the same policy (e.g., journals governed by the same professional society for which there is a society-level policy). The following outlets fall within this category:

Some outlets that we publish in do not require that copyright be transferred (e.g., Open Access journals, many conference proceedings). In such cases we can find no evidence that we have signed a copyright transfer agreement to follow, and copyright is retained by the authors. The following outlets fall within this category:

In addition, there are a number of outlets for which we do not post any version of the article. These fall into two broad categories:

Terminology

In our summaries below we often refer to the following versions of an article:

  • Submitted Version: This refers to the version of the article originally submitted to the journal, before any peer review takes place.
  • Accepted Version: This refers to the version of the article after the final changes by the author have been made, and reflects alterations made due to peer review, but not the changes made by the publisher.
  • Published Version: This is the final, authoritative version of the article, complete with the publishers typesetting.

Elsevier journals

Summary: Elsevier allows the Accepted Version of the manuscript to be posted on author websites, provided a link to the journal is included.

Details: The relevant text of the Elsevier policy (accessed December 3rd 2012) is as follows:

We also do not require authors to remove electronic preprints from publicly accessible servers (including the author's own home page) once an article has been accepted for publication. Further, we have announced in May 2004 a change in policy that facilitates institutional repositories by permitting authors to revise their personal versions of their papers to reflect changes made in the peer review process. This new policy permits authors to post such revised personal versions on their own web sites and the sites of their institutions, provided a link to the journal is included.

This policy applies to our publications in the following journals:

Compliance Commentary: As far as we can tell, we are in complete compliance with this policy.

Taylor & Francis journals

Summary: Elsevier allows the Accepted Version of the manuscript to be posted on author websites, provided a link to the journal is included.

Details: The relevant text of the Elsevier policy (accessed 24 March 2016) is as follows:

Author's Original Manuscript (AOM): This is your original manuscript (often called a "preprint"), and you can share this as much as you like. If you do decide to post it anywhere, including onto an academic networking site, we would recommend you use an amended version of the wording below to encourage usage and citation of your final, published article. ... As a Taylor & Francis author, you can post your Accepted Manuscript (AM) on your departmental or personal website at any point after publication of your article (this includes posting to Facebook, Google groups, and LinkedIn, and linking from Twitter). To encourage citation of your work we recommend that you insert a link from your posted AM to the published article on Taylor & Francis Online.

This policy applies to our publications in the following journals:

Compliance Commentary: As far as we can tell, we are in complete compliance with this policy.

Springer journals

Summary: Springer allows the Accepted Version of the manuscript to be posted on author websites after a 12 month embargo period, provided a link to Springer's page for the article is given, and a specific piece of text accompanies the link.

Details: The relevant text of the Springer policy (December 3rd 2012) is as follows:

"An author may self-archive an author-created version of his/her article on his/her own website and or in his/her institutional repository. He/she may also deposit this version on his/her funder's or funder's designated repository at the funder's request or as a result of a legal obligation, provided it is not made publicly available until 12 months after official publication. He/ she may not use the publisher's PDF version, which is posted on www.springerlink.com, for the purpose of self-archiving or deposit. Furthermore, the author may only post his/her version provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com".

This policy applies to our publications in the following journals:

Compliance Commentary: We are in compliance with this policy in all respects except one. The specific piece of text is missing. We are working on this, but it requires non-trivial modification to the scripts used to generate the publication lists.

Cambridge University Press journals

Summary: CUP allows the Accepted Version of the article to be posted on author websites, provided a link to the journal is included, and the posting includes bibliographical information and a copyright notice in the name of CUP.

Details: The text of the CUP policy (December 3rd 2012) makes a distinction between four versions of a paper: a Author’s Original (AO) is a version that was written prior to any submission to the journal; a Submitted Manuscript Under Review (SMUR) is a version that has been submitted but not accepted; a Accepted Manuscript (AM) is the authors version of a manuscript that has been accepted; and the Version of Record (VoR) is the final version that is produced by the publisher. The AM version corresponds to what we have referred to as the Accepted Version. Author rights are defined by the following text:

"The author may post either the AO or SMUR version of the author’s article on the author’s personal or departmental web page. The author may post the AM version of the author’s article on the author’s personal or departmental web page, provided the posting is accompanied by a prominent statement that the article has been accepted for publication and will appear in a revised form, subsequent to peer review and/or editorial input by Cambridge University Press, in [Journal title] published by Cambridge University Press, together with a copyright notice in the name of the copyright holder (Cambridge University Press or the sponsoring Society, as appropriate). On publication the full bibliographical details of the article (volume: issue number (date), page numbers) must be inserted after the journal title, together with a link to the Cambridge website address for the Journal. The author may post the VoR version of the article (in PDF or HTML form) on the author’s personal or departmental web page, no sooner than upon its appearance at Cambridge Journals Online, subject to file availability and provided the posting includes a prominent statement of the full bibliographical details, a copyright notice in the name of the copyright holder (Cambridge University Press or the sponsoring Society, as appropriate), and a link to the online edition of the journal at Cambridge Journals Online."

This policy applies to our publications in the following journals:

Compliance Commentary: We appear to be almost completely in compliance. The one shortfall may be that the header notice at the top of the publication lists makes a generic statement about copyright (i.e., that it is owned by the relevant journal). It may be the case that the text of the policy requires a more specific statement about CUP holding copyright to be included adjacent to each CUP-published entry in the list. If so, it should be possible to fix, but requires a non-trivial modification to the scripts that generate the publication lists.

Papers published in Sage journals

Summary: Sage allows the Accepted Version to be posted on author websites after a 12 month embargo period

Details: The Sage website contains the following policy. Under Q7 it discusses author rights to post articles. The relevant text reads:

(1) You may circulate or post on any repository or website the version of the article that you submitted to the journal (i.e. the version before peer–review) – "version 1". (2) You may post on any non–commercial* repository or website* the version of your article that was accepted for publication – "version 2". The article may not be made available earlier than 12 months after publication in the Journal issue and may not incorporate the changes made by SAGE after acceptance. ... (4) You may not post the final version of the article as published by SAGE or the SAGE–created PDF – "version 3".

This policy applies to our publications in the following journals:

Compliance Commentary: As far as we can tell, we are in complete compliance with this policy.

American Psychological Association journals

Summary: APA allows the Accepted Version to be posted on author websites, provided that a statement of APA copyright is included, and specific text is included in the posting.

Details: The text of the publication agreement offered by the American Psychological Association (APA) links to the following policy and explicitly states that the terms of this policy are incorporated by reference into the publication agreement. The policy states that:

Authors of articles published in APA journals may post a copy of the final manuscript, as accepted for publication, as a word processing file, on their personal website, their employer's server, or in their institution's repository after it is accepted for publication. The following conditions would prevail: (1) The posted article must carry an APA copyright notice and include a link to the APA journal home page or to the final published version using the article’s DOI, or digital object identifier, that may be found on the first page of the published article, in the upper right-hand corner. (2) Further, the posted article must include the following statement: "This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record." (3) APA does not provide electronic copies of the APA published version for this purpose, and authors are not permitted to scan in the APA typeset version of the published article. (4) Authors are not permitted to download and subsequently post the APA typeset version of the published article."

This policy applies to our publications in the following journals:

Compliance Commentary: The APA policy is unusual in two respect. Firstly, for authors that use typesetting software (e.g., LaTeX) rather than word processing software (e.g. Word), there is no analog of a "word processing file". We must assume that they are referring to the final pdf rather than the LaTeX source, since the LaTeX source does not have any analog of "first page", and is not intended to be readable as an article. Secondly, it appears to requires the text to be inserted in the posted article itself, not to the webpage. On those assumptions, we appear to be in compliance

Neural Computation

Summary: Permission appears to be granted to post articles subject to a 3 month embargo period

Details: Neural Computation is published by MIT press, and as yet we have not found a general purpose policy. However, the most publication agreement that was signed for the Navarro & Griffiths (2008) paper contained the following statement regarding web publication rights:

You also retain the right to post the Article on your website or institutional repository three months after it has been published in Neural Computation so long as the Article is not offered for sale or distribution. As a condition of reserving the preceding rights, you agree that MIT and Neural Computation will be given first publication credit, and proper copyright notice will be displayed on the work (both on the work as a whole and, where applicable, on the Article as well) whenever such publication or electronic display occurs.

Compliance Commentary: We appear to be in compliance. The one shortfall may be that the header notice at the top of the publication lists makes a generic statement about copyright (i.e., that it is owned by the relevant journal). It may be the case that the text of the policy requires a more specific statement about MIT holding copyright to be included adjacent the entry. It may also be the case that we need to modify the original documents to display copyright information (it is unclear to us what "where applicable means"). However, the bibliographic information does make clear that Neural Computation is the proper publisher of the article.

Cognitive Science Society journals

Summary: Authors may post articles to their website.

Details: The Cognitive Science Society publishes the following two journals through Wiley.

Wiley does not appear to have a policy at the level of the press (e.g.). Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science are both published by the Cognitive Science Society, and the copyright transfer is governed by the Cognitive Science Society's Publication Agreement. The relevant clause in this agreement (as of August 2012, at least) states that:

"Authors are entitled to distribute copies for the article for personal use, either on paper or electronically, through their own personal website, or through the website of an agency by which they are employed, but permission of the Cognitive Science Society is required to reproduce published papers in other sources, including electronic archives".

Compliance Commentary: We appear to be in compliance. The one shortfall might be that we do not currently make any explicit statement about what usage is permitted by the recipient.

Summary: Despite some ambiguity in the text, JASSS appears to allow authors to post articles

Details: The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) is a complicated case. Their copyright page (December 3rd 2012) notes that copyright is transferred to JASSS, and contains the following text regarding self archiving:

Authors may link from institutional repositories, home pages, or other websites under their or their institutions' control to the final, published form of material published in JASSS (including linking to the final PDF versions of articles), without charge or explicit permission.

Authors and others are requested not to make electronic copies of JASSS articles for hosting on other servers. Not only is this a waste of effort and time (because the original versions of JASSS articles are freely available to everyone without subscription), but having more than one copy can lead to confusion over which version is the current or definitive version.

Note to managers of institutional repositories: Unlike most publishers, JASSS encourages links from your repository to the published version of articles, and discourages depositing pre-prints, post-prints or other versions of articles.

Compliance Commentary: The difficulty here is that there is a discrepancy between the explicitly stated rights (i.e., linking) and what is not allowed. Notice that the text here states that "authors and others are requested" (emphasis added) not to host files on other servers, and that JASSS discourages (emphasis in original) hosting files in repositories. This choice of words is presumably deliberate. The plain meaning of this text is that they prefer links, but do not forbid hosting. If they had intended to forbid file hosting, they would have said so when discussing file hosting. We therefore believe that file hosting is permitted. In any case, we currently link only and do not host, and are therefore in compliance even if our interpretation is incorrect.

Summary: Authors retain copyright and all rights to publish. The publisher has a non-exclusive licence to publish.

Details: The Journal of Problem Solving is an Open Access journal that is covered by the Purdue ePubs licencing agreement. As noted on their page:

Authors do not transfer copyright when submitting to Purdue e-Pubs but rather license the right for Purdue University to provide access to their scholarly material.

Compliance Commentary: The Purdue licence is non-exclusive. Copyright holders can publish on their own website. We are in compliance.

Cognitive Science conference proceedings

Summary: This is a complicated case due to the lack of documentation, but on balance we believe that authors retain the right to post articles

Details: Many of our papers appear in the Proceedings of the XXth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci; published by Lawrence Erlbaum up to 2006, and then by the Cognitive Science Society from 2007). The position taken by the CSS (see the conference FAQ) is that these are not "archival" papers, and so the content of these papers can be freely incorporated into subsequent papers. For instance, the FAQ for the 2013 conference (December 3rd 2012) contains the following text:

Q: Does appearing in the Cognitive Science Conference preclude the same work from appearing in a journal later on? 
A: This conference is not considered an archival publication, so the same work can indeed be submitted to a journal later on. That said, the conference format does tend to force many details to be left out that would be expected in a journal article, and generally a conference paper that is expanded into a successful journal article includes at least 30% additional material.

The fact that the CSS allows "the same work" to be submitted to another journal (albeit while making the obvious point that one usually needs to do more work to get a CogSci paper accepted) strongly implies that they do not seek to place any restrictions on authors re-publishing the work. Given that placing articles on the web is legally equivalent to publication, we assume that this implies that authors may post their CogSci articles on their website.

The above is encouraging, but we believe that we have even stronger rights than this. We cannot find any evidence that we have in fact transferred copyright to CSS for these papers. We do not think that we have signed a copyright transfer form, and do not recall having seen any legal agreement on the conference submission system. One must presume that submitting the paper implies at the very least a non-exclusive licence for CSS to publish the papers themselves, but that is not equivalent to transferring copyright or limiting our own rights as authors

Compliance Commentary: This is a difficult case to assess given the lack of details. Overall we believe that we are in compliance with copyright requirements, insofar as we believe that (a) in all likelihood we retain copyright, and that (b) if for some reason we do not, then the conference FAQ gives implicit permission to reuse the content as we see fit. Furthermore, if both (a) and (b) turn out to be incorrect, we have taken steps to ensure that no losses are incurred by the CSS due to our file hosting. Specifically we we note that (a) the CSS makes the same content freely available on their websites, (b) we link to that content from our page, and (c) they do not post advertisements on their webpage, and so do not appear to derive any revenue from page views. We conclude that if we are wrong about the ownership of copyright, our actions have not caused harm. This should not be taken to imply an intention to violate copyright on our part: we genuinely believe we have the right to post the pdfs, and will immediately remove them if we discover that this belief is in error.

NIPS proceedings

Summary: This is a complicated case due to the lack of documentation, but on balance we believe that authors retain the right to post articles

Details: The NIPS proceedings, published under the title Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems are posted to the open web by the publisher (the NIPS Foundation): the papers can be found here. We cannot find evidence that the NIPS Foundation (to whom we submitted the papers originally) makes a copyright claim over these papers, and neither can we find any copyright transfer agreements in our records for any of the NIPS papers we have published.

Compliance Commentary: This is a difficult case to assess given the lack of details. Overall we believe that we are in compliance with copyright requirements, insofar as we believe that we retain copyright. We have also taken steps to ensure that, if our belief is in error, our actions are not such that any losses are incurred by the copyright holder: specifically, we note that (a) the NIPS foundation makes the same content freely available on their website, (b) we link to that content from our page, and (c) they do not post advertisements on their webpage, and so do not appear to derive any revenue from page views. We conclude that if we are wrong about the ownership of copyright, our actions have not caused harm. This should not be taken to imply an intention to violate copyright on our part: we genuinely believe we have the right to post the pdfs, and will immediately remove them if we discover that this belief is in error.

Outlets with restrictive policies

The following journals are referred to here:

The copyright transfer agreements signed with Australian Journal of Psychology, Developmental Science, and Philosophy Compass are quite restrictive, and there is no policy that we can find that give us any meaningful permissions in any of these cases. The agreement does allow authors to post the Submitted Version (i.e. before any peer review or any subsequent changes) to the web. In our view, this permission is of little to no value, and there's a good chance that we've lost that version of the article anyway. Given this, we do not post any version of these papers on our website.

Outlets not yet investigated

We have contributed to the following edited volumes:

  • Sage Publications. Encyclopedia of Language Development
  • Oxford University Press. Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Linguistics
  • Cambridge Press. Advances in Minimum Description Length: Theory and Applications
  • Cambridge Press. Formal Approaches in Categorization
  • CSLI Publications. Language from a cognitive perspective: Grammar, Usage, and Processing
  • CSLI Publications. Morphology and the Web of Grammar: Essays in Memory of Steven G. Lapointe
  • Erlbaum. Twenty-First Century Psycholinguistics: Four Cornerstones
  • John Benjamins Publishing Company. Experience, Variation, and Generalization: Learning a First Language
  • Mouton de Gruyter. Recursion and Human Language
  • Mouton de Gruyter. Statistical Learning and Language Acquisition
  • Oxford. The Origins of Object Knowledge
  • Oxford. The Probabilistic Mind: Prospects for Bayesian Cognitive Science
  • Wiley. Encyclopedia of Behavioral Statistics.

As yet we haven't looked into author rights for these, and they are not available on the website until we have found positive evidence that they are okay to post.

In addition to the edited book chapters listed above, there are a number of conference papers for which we haven't yet found any explicit information regarding copyright and author rights.

  • KES 2000: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Engineering Systems & Allied Technologies.
  • 2005 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory
  • Proceedings of the IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging 2005, vol 5674 (Computational Imaging III)
  • Proceedings of the Second Quantum Interaction Symposium
  • ASCS09: Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science

Again, these are not available on the website until we have found positive evidence that they are okay to post.