This is an account of things you might want to know about our copyright and licencing policy for the journal Compositio Mathematica. For the copyright form click here. It is not a formal interpretation of your legal rights if you are planning to be an author. If you want legal advice, you should seek it from an intellectual property lawyer. Given that most mathematics papers have no intrinsic commercial value and there is little opportunity for libel, you might wonder why such a fuss is made about copyright. It is all about recognising ownership and it is important to the Publisher that we have the right to publish your work. Firstly we need to be assured that you, an author, really are the author, otherwise we are liable to be sued by the true owner and originator or the work. By we, that means the Foundation Compositio Mathematica, who own the licences and long terms rights in the journal, the London Mathematical Society who manage the journal, and Cambridge University Press who distribute the journals both in print and electronically. As not-for-profit organisations who feed the income from the journal back into supporting mathematical research (and Cambridge University), none of us are keen to be sued for plagiarism in our publications!
Most authors quite rightly assume that they are both originator of the intellectual property (i.e. they thought up the bright idea) and the owner of the work they produce. Unless something interferes in the process, the default position in most countries with a law of copyright is that all authors own their own work unless someone like an employer comes and takes that right away from them. In some countries, this ownership is expressly stated in their fundamental rights (droit d'auteur) but in other places it may be that your employer or the government is the owner of the work. This is becoming an area of increasing complexity where some universities are writing new employment contracts to claim ownership of any intellectual property produced; there's also a movement called 'creative commons' where people are encouraged to dispense with some of their rights. The US Government has always made an exception for work done under its contracts, which is why its quite commonplace to find a exception clause with the odd statement that 'there is no copyright' in their case, and we have one in our form beside the tick box on the first page.
As an author, your first check should be to make sure that you do actually own the copyright of your work before signing a copyright or licence transfer form. The easiest way to do this is to check with your employer. If it turns out that they own your intellectual property, you may want to argue with them, but there is nothing the Publisher can do about this. Your next step is to put down, under 'Name of the copyright owner, if not the Author(s)', the name of the institution who owns a part of your mind, and ask them to sign a permission form to be attached to the copyright form; this is covered in item 5 of the form. On our form, item 3 just says that you have the moral right of authorship (so that its your name that appears as author, not your employers) and item 5 says that you have appended a signed form for any other work you have included. An example might be where you have included a photograph of someone in an article - not uncommon with obituaries. You would then need signed permission from the photographer to allow the photo to be reproduced.
Having got over that hurdle, you might as an author, want to consider how much of your work is truly original. This is covered by item 4 of the agreement. This is not too difficult for mathematicians who understand that we are all standing on the shoulders of Giants. Provided you have given the Giants full acknowledgement in your references, the Editors decide when accepting a paper that the work is substantially original in the context of the references. However, plagiarism is not just about forgetting to cite a reference; it is about the outright copying of pieces of text and, under your own name, passing off clearly identifiable ideas that were published first by others. Deliberate plagiarism can be difficult to spot because most plagiarists don't cite the true author of their work! This is why authors are asked to warrant that they are indeed the author. The warranty means that you, rather than us, will cover the financial cost if it is legally proved that you have deliberately stolen someone else's work.
That describes the pitfalls. The next stage is to consider what the licence means in terms of what you may do and what you expect the Publisher to do. The main clauses are given by item 1 which says what the Publisher can do, and item 2 which says what you as author (or, more precisely, the copyright holder) can still do.
Item 1 states that you have granted the Publisher an exclusive licence, which means that you cannot then grant anyone else the same licence. This stops you submitting the same article to other publishers or allowing other publishers to reproduce your work except under the circumstances described in item 2. Item 1(a) allows the Publisher to publish the work or chunks of it and item 1(b) refers to secondary licences - a bit like subletting your apartment. Notice that this subitem only allows them to sublicence to the 'respectable' agencies named and that if they wish to sell a sublicence to anyone else, they must obtain the approval of the copyright holder, which will hopefully be you and not your employer. Assuming that you want your article to receive the maximum exposure, permitting the Publisher to publish your work and translate and disseminate it wherever possible is a Good Thing. Why? Well, your article may be freely available (see item 2) on the arXiv or your home page in preprint form, but there's nothing like the final, peer-reviewed, copy-edited and authorised version for providing credibility to the reader and giving them a warm feeling of assurance that they really have got the polished authorised version. Therefore you still want to ensure that the Published version is disseminated as widely as possible. Also, if you don't encourage traffic to the Published version, one day in many years to come, they will go out of business and then there will be no journal to authorise your future work.
Item 2 says that the Copyright holder retains the right to do several important things with the article: firstly (Item 2(a)) you may post a preprint version on the ArXiv or your home page, and you can leave these up once the article has been published however there are two conditions. You must update the ArXiv once you have a reference for your published paper and you must acknowledge that the preprint is not the same as the published version. The first condition is simple - it is really a reminder because not enough authors remember to update the ArXiv once a paper has been accepted we ask that you acknowledge that your work has been accepted by Compositio Mathematica. There is a lot of debate about little or no added value being given to a paper during the publication process. One often hears phrases like 'mathematicians edit and typeset their own papers'. If Only! Ask any of our recently published authors how much editing and typesetting is done after a paper has been accepted. But, beyond that, remember how much the process of peer review has contributed to your paper, and not just from one journal but from several if the paper has been rejected in the past. The journal doesn't pay referees but, through managing the process and via the Editors who make the final judgement, it adds quality to a paper and a stamp of approval. So the restrictions on item 2a are to do with asking authors to acknowledge that value has been added. In doing so, we hope to provide a longer term protection for the future of the journal, and that even though the preprint forms are freely available on the web, there is still some incentive to libraries to subscribe. Item 2(b) allows you to use the fully authorised version for teaching purposes - this is often described as 'fair use' and doesn't stop you using your own work in your courses - however it still recognises that there is an extra value to the fully authorised work and you may not simply post the pdf offprint on your home page for anyone to download; it must be hosted on a secure university intranet site where access is restricted. Item 2(c) allows you to publish your selected works or include your work in any other extended volume or monograph. Permission will automatically begiven, but this clause provide a check that it is you and not a secondary publisher, who makes money out of republishing others work without their permission, that wants to publish your work.
Finally, there is item 6. This is a final benefit for handing over a licence to publish. It states that we will do our best to look after your moral rights as author and if necessary make efforts to prevent someone plagiarising your work or another publisher reprinting your work without your permission; and what's more, we won't charge you for doing this.
So, in summary, in return for the benefit of publishing your work and making money from selling it, we will improve your work through passing on expert advice from the referee and Editors and later through copy-editing and typesetting your work. We also add a stamp of authorisation to your work, i.e. that it becomes one of the papers published in a journal that, taken as a whole, reach a certain, internationally recognised and accepted standard. Finally, we will do our best to publicise and disseminate your work and protect it against plagiarism or unscrupulous piracy. Finally, after 6 years, the article will be freely available for anyone to read, regardless of subscription. All that for signing over a licence and asking you not to publicly post the final version yourself, but to protect the authorised version for long enough for us to make money out of it. All the money we do make gets fed back into supporting mathematical research through the programmes of the Foundation Compositio Mathematica and the London Mathematical Society, apart from a little that goes to Cambridge University. It's a bargain! (This explanation was written by Susan Hezlet of the LMS)