Re: [jats-list] JATS4R permissions recommendation revision

["Kevin Hawkins kevin.s.hawkins@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <jats-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Let's start with use case 2, which I think is more straightforward. The
source of the problem here seems to be that some publishers wants to
take a short-cut in their tagging.B  However, isn't the point of JATS4R
to coerce users into a single way of doing things to facilitate
interoperability?B  If so, I think it's within the scope of JATS4R to say
that you want the rightsholders listed explicitly rather than requiring
someone to infer the rightsholders from the list of authors.

As for use case 1, any rightsholder (not just a government employee)
could in theory choose to license their work under CC0, waiving all
copyrights and related or neighboring rights.B  You don't have to be a
government employee to do this.B  But if the rightsholder chooses CC0, I
think you are right that <copyright-year> is not applicable.

That said, allow me to be pedantic for a moment and provide some
background on what I suspect is the implied use case: an employee of the
US federal government.

Under US copyright law, an employee normally has no right in the work
that they create; instead, their employer owns the work.B  (This is not
the case with contractors, though the employment contract sometimes
assigns all rights to the employer anyway.)B  Works created by US federal
employees are not protected by copyright in the US, but the US federal
government can in theory assert copyright in works of its employees
through international treaties (see
https://cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.html#317 ).B  That is,
someone inside the US can makes copies of documents of the US federal
government, but the US government could in theory sue you for violation
of copyright if you do so in another country.

Given this strange copyright in US government works (that is dormant
within the US), I'm unclear on who is actually authorized to license a
work of the federal government, but I doubt it is the employee who
created the work.B  So I doubt that an author of a journal article who is
a federal employee and wrote the article as part of their job duties
actually has the right to attach a CC0 license to their work. Perhaps
the head of the agency in which they work could authorize this.

But if, despite the ambiguous legal status, the author who is an
employee of the US federal government has chosen a CC0, then you'll want
to record this in the JATS encoding.B  As above, you're probably right
that <copyright-year> would be inapplicable.

Kevin

On 1/4/18 10:11 AM, Melissa Harrison m.harrison@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Hi there
>
> I was hoping for some feedback from the community on the JATS4R
> steering committee's potential revisionB to the Permissions
> recommendation <https://jats4r.org/permissions>.
>
> It currently lists <copyright-year> and <copyright-holder> as required
> tags, but we have found some use cases where these are not required or
> even not actually allowed, and so are proposing updating the
> recommendation to make these elements optional.
> *Use case 1 - Authors work for government organizations*
>
>   * Open Access content: Some authors working for government
>     organizations waiver their right to copyright, and use of a CC0
>     <https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/>license is used.
>   * For subscriptionB journals, the copyright is waivered and there is
>     a non-exclusive license (publisher and government) - generally a
>     non-machine readable/standard license
>
> *Use case 2 - Rather than add "The authors" in the copyright holder
> line, some publishers just omit it*
> Some publishers would not list out the names of the authors in the
> copyright-holder tag, and rather than add "The authors" just omit the
> copyright holder line.
> **
> Does anyone have any feedback to JATS4R on this and do you agree?
> Thanks
> Melissa
> (on-behalf of the JATS4R Steering Committee)
> **
>
>
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> Melissa Harrison, Head of Production Operations, /eLife/
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