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Welcome to the Copyright Experiences Wiki
The purpose of this website is for legal academics and others to share our copyright experiences with law journals and other legal publishers. As academics, we have an interest in ensuring the widest dissemination of our work. Historically, Law Journals have tended to use standard-form copyright agreements that reqire a copyright assignment, and have tended to impose unreasonable restrictions on our rights to share and re-use our own work.
This is starting to change. Increasingly, law journals, are adopting reasonable policies, or at least are open to negotiation. Due to the transitory nature of student-run law journal staffs, some staffs are actually unaware of their own past practices.
On the pages linked from here, legal writers describe their copyright experiences and law journals describe their policies. The information is as good or bad as what you contribute to it.
If you use an RSS newsreader you can keep up to date on changes to this site by subscribing to the atom feed or the RSS feed.
Information About Specific Law Journals
Since there are a lot of journals and publishers, links from this page are to the first letter in a journal's name.
Journals starting with
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Academic presses and legal publishers
Model Copyright Agreements
There's a separate page of model copyright agreements.
The Open Access Law Project
In Its Own Words
(This section is copied from the Open Access Law Program homepage)
The Open Access Law Program (OAL Program) consists of a set of resources to promote open access in legal publishing. These resources include:
- Open Access Law Journal Principles. The OAL Program encourages law journals to commit to a set of OAL Journal Principles. These Principles require that a journal 1) take only a limited term license, 2) provide a citable copy of the final version of the article, and 3) provide public access to the journal's standard publishing contract. In return, the author promises to attribute first publication to the journal. Here is a list of journals adopting the Principles. [CE NOTE: http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/oalaw/oalawjournals/ updated link for list of journals]
- Open Access Law Author Pledge. For authors wishing to commit publicly to open access ideals, we have established an OAL Author Pledge. This pledge commits authors to only publish law review articles in journals that adhere to a minimum OAL commitment. Here is a list of authors who have signed the Pledge.
- Open Access Model Publishing Agreement. The OAL Program also provides a Model Agreement that embodies the OAL Journal Principles in a fair and neutral contract that is easy for both authors and law reviews to adopt. It also provides for an easy mechanism for authors and journals to adopt Creative Commons licenses to make their work more easily available.
Discussion
This looks like a great project. So far a number of journal have adopted the principles...but not that many authors.
What Is a Wiki?
For more information on Wikis in general, start with the WikiPedia
User-Contributed Questions and Answers
Here's a place to submit Questions and Answers.
About this site
Please drop your ideas and comments into the suggestions box. If you are interested in what is under the hood, visit the Change Log.
The project is administered by Michael Froomkin, inspired by Dan Hunter and Margaret Jane Radin.
At present (1 Dec 2005), every page in this wiki except the front page is open for editing. The front page is closed due to spam attacks. Please send editorial suggestions to any of the Curators.
(v. 2.10)
How To Help
There are several ways you can help make this a better resource.
- Contribute your experiences with law journals on the appropriate pages (see links above).
- Help design this website. Suggestions are welcome in the Suggestions Box. Or you could just go ahead and do it -- this is a wiki, after all.
- Copyright Experiences needs some friends to help it fight spam, as it has become a wikispam target. Anyone can help simply by checking in on the Recent Changes page once or more a day and restoring any page that has been defaced. (You restore a page (1) by going to it, (2) clicking on the page's history, (3) finding the most recent un-defaced version, (4) opening it for editing, then (5) saving it. That overwrites the defaced version.)
If you are willing to take on a more formal role, please contact one of the Curators.
This page has been protected due to the constant and egregious activity of what we all have come to know as spam. If you wish to make changes to the front page please e-mail one of the Curators.
Important note: On Aug. 19, 2007 a number of new tools to block wikispam were added to this site including Bad Behavior and other common tools. In the event that these cause you problems, please contact Michael Froomkin
Regrettably, the first round wasn't enough, so on Aug. 27 I added the ConfirmEdit plugin which enables capchas. I hate these, but the alternative seems worse....
In Feb 2013 we moved the site to wiki.law.miami.edu and added the ConfirmAccount plugin. The site was being overrun by fake users with fake user pages plugging dubious products. The downside is that if you want to create a new user account you will need to be approved. Create the new user, which puts you in the queue, and then drop the owner a quite email and we'll have you in the system as quickly as we can.
Please see documentation on customizing the interface and the User's Guide for usage and configuration help.