I’ve spent much of today on one of my least favorite tasks: dealing with copyright issues. JAWRA’s Copyright Assignment Form (CAF) gives authors certain limited rights to distribute their papers among colleagues. However, it does NOT allow authors to put our PDF of their paper on a public website!
Many “violations” are well-meaning attempts to give a paper more exposure, but there are unintended consequences:
1. Having two identical copies online confuses search engines and can lead to lower rankings.
2. Every hit on an unauthorized version is one less hit on the AWRA site, thus lowering our count of times a paper is viewed. Libraries and researchers watch this number.
3. Any Discussion/Reply or Errata are a critical part of the scientific record which only the official site can provide.
4. The official site maintains updated links to related articles by the authors and others, increasing the chances of citation.
Publishers, including Wiley-Blackwell, Inc., are getting better at finding copyright violations. Our approach upon finding a problem begins with me writing a gentle email to the author. Most quickly reply with apologies.
Authors can distribute their papers to colleagues, including students, in a variety of legitimate ways without using an open website. For a paper which must be freely available to the public, we offer Wiley-Blackwell’s OnlineOpen for an additional fee. I’ll cover this in a later posting.
So, authors, please take a little time to actually read the CAF before you sign it. We’ve gone to some effort to establish terms which are fair and let our official website do a good job of distributing your paper.
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