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responsibility for the paper? This question has come up a number of times in recent years. Several people listed as
authors of published papers later shown to contain fraudulent data have tried to escape blame by pleading ignorance.
"I didn't really keep track of what my coauthor was doing" has been a typical lament. But this excuse does not sell.
Every author of a paper must take responsibility for the validity of the science being reported.

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What Is Copyright?

Copyright is the exclusive legal right to reproduce, publish, and sell the matter and form of a literary or artistic work.
Copyright protects original forms of expression but not the ideas being expressed. The data you are presenting are not
protected by copyright; however, the collection of the data and the way you have presented them are protected. You
own the copyright of a paper you wrote, for the length of your life plus 50 years, as long as it was not done for an
employer or commissioned as work for hire. If you have collaborated on the work, each person is a co-owner of the
copyright, with equal rights.

Copyright is divisible. The owner of the copyright may grant one person a nonexclusive right to reproduce the work
and another the right to prepare derivative works based on the copyrighted work. Copyright can also be transferred.
Transfers of the copyright must be made in writing by the owner. An employer may transfer copyright to the
individual who developed the original work. As stated earlier, if you wish to copy, reprint, or republish all or portions
of a copyrighted work that you do not own, you must get permission from the copyright owner. If you, as an author,
have transferred the complete copyright of your work to a publisher, you must obtain permission for use of your own
material from the publisher.

Fair use of copyrighted material is legal, according to the 1976 Copyright Act. The law allows you to copy and
distribute small sections of a copyrighted work. It does not allow you to copy complete articles and republish them
without permission, whether for profit or otherwise. Academia has profited from the fair-use inclusion to the
copyright law. However, the current trend to supplying customized documents has distorted the fair-use provision.
Some copying services are publishing and distributing complete papers without the permission of the author or
publisher.

Copyright Considerations

The legal reasons for seeking appropriate permission when republishing someone else's work relate to copyright law.
If a journal is copyrighted, and almost all of them are, legal ownership of the published papers becomes vested in the
copyright holder. Thus, if you wish to republish

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copyrighted material, you must obtain approval of the copyright holder or risk suit for infringement.

Publishers acquire copyright so that they will have the legal basis, acting in their own interests and on behalf of all
authors whose work is contained in the journals, for preventing unauthorized use of such published work. Thus, the
publishing company and its authors are protected against plagiarism, misappropriation of published data, unauthorized
reprinting for advertising and other purposes, and other potential misuse.

In the U.S.A., under the 1909 Assignment of Copyright Act, submission of a manuscript to a journal was presumed to
carry with it assignment of the author's ownership to the journal (publisher). Upon publication of the journal, with the
appropriate copyright imprint in place and followed by the filing of copies and necessary fees with the Register of

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