Author's rights, by which I mean mine

Tue 20 Mar 2007 09:03 PM

My d-cog paper just appeared in Social Studies of Science. The journal does not provide paper offprints. Instead, they sent me a link which allowed me to download a disk image. On the disk image was an application that allowed me to open a secured PDF. Once I indicated that I was using the computer on which I intended to use the PDF, I was allowed to see the paper.

It will allow me to print the paper from this computer and forward the paper as a link to as many as 25 other people.* The whole rigamarole is meant to preclude my being able to forward the file directly or upload it to the web.

I was rather cross about this copy protection, and I wondered if the journal itself could be so difficult to access. By way of the UAlbany library website, I loaded the most recent issue and downloaded my paper. It is an ordinary PDF that has none of the crippling DRM that my author copy has got.

Subscribers, it seems, are more trusted than authors.**

* This latter part doesn't actually seem to work. I had someone e-mail me and ask for an offprint of my paper, but I can't see how to exercise the promised functionality.

** Considering my last post, I should add that the SSS author agreement is not especially egregious. I signed rights over to them, but the agreement explicitly permits me to reuse the paper in whole or in part in any work that I author, edit, or compile, to distribute photocopies to colleagues or students, and to put a final author draft on the web or in a repository. I am officially supposed to wait a year before putting it in a repository, but that is pretty standard.