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Author's Guide to ACM Interim Copyright Policies
This article has been published in the April issue of Communications of the ACM. The version here includes corrections of typographical errors found there.
In the past few years electronic media have opened up a whole new range of possibilities for authors and readers of technical papers and articles. ACM is moving with these changes toward fully electronic publication of its journals, magazines, proceedings, and newsletters. As part of this, ACM has changed its copyright policies. As an author, you have a special stake in this. You are the source of worthwhile information that must be easy to locate and must not be lost in the junk so readily available in the Internet.
Here are the kinds of changes that are happening that we aim to accommodate:
As these changes occur, the opportunity for unauthorized copying and piracy of your works increases. ACM wishes to operate as an agent protecting your interests by placing the ACM imprint on your work so that readers can distinguish it from the blather: by distributing your work widely and by making sure that your work is continuously available on familiar servers no matter where you are.
These services will be paid for from the fees paid by ACM members and subscribers, and from copyright release and license fees by others. ACM aims to keep these fees small and painless so that ACM's services remain more attractive than other services or no service at all.
With the new, interim copyright policies, ACM intends to enable the widest possible access to works of ACM authors and to promote easy distribution for noncommercial and educational purposes. These policies are entitled interim because the Publications Board wishes to review them in one year and make adjustments and improvements in light of experience.
The purpose of this document is to describe the ACM copyright policies from the author's perspective.
ACM is moving to shift its publication operation from paper-only journals and magazines to electronic distribution from a structured database. The first elements of this shift will be visible in spring 1995. ACM will provide print versions of publications as long as there is a market for them. This is being done to accommodate a shift in author and reader practices that are accompanying the emergence of world- wide network services.
By the end of the decade, we envisage a world of scientific and technical publishing with three main characteristics. First, the definitive versions of works will be stored in a network of databases, offering new kinds of services such as browsing, searching, extracting, and repackaging; simple pricing schemes will be used to collect nominal fees from those who have not subscribed to the database services. Second, the servers constituting the network will be maintained by copyright holders as a service to authors and readers. Third, active links will be a standard form of connection among works; they will serve both as citations and as automatic means of obtaining copies on demand.
As you prepare a work for publication, you usually go through a period of passing drafts among interested associates for comment, and then, after submission to an editor, a period of review and revision. The editor will not ask you to transfer copyright until the paper is accepted.
When you submit the work for consideration by an ACM editor, you should include this notice on your personal copy posted on servers:
This work has been submitted for publication. Copyright may be transferred without further notice and this version may no longer be accessible.
You should also keep in mind that ACM and other publishers have a policy that authors submit a work for consideration by only one editor at a time. If you feel it is necessary to submit the same work (or substantially the same versions) to two editors at once, disclose this fact to them. It will save you a great deal of lasting embarrassment later when the reviewers catch the duplicate submission.
When your work is accepted for publication, the editor will ask to transfer copyright to ACM. When you have signed the copyright form, you should incorporate the citation and the ACM copyright notice into all your copies of your work. The copyright notice authorizes a wide range of copying for personal or noncommercial classroom use. It informs readers and others who want to make other kinds of copies how to do so easily and painlessly via an electronic address (permissions@acm.org). It is acceptable to place the string " © copyright 199x, by ACM, Inc." with a hypertext link to the full copyright notice.
Copyright © 199x by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or (permissions@acm.org).
As part of a copyright transfer to ACM, the original copyright holder (you or your employer) retains:
In the future, "publication" is going to mean that an ACM editor has declared your work acceptable after a review process. The individual reader will decide whether or when to obtain a printed copy. The editor who has accepted your paper for publication will place it in the ACM digital library and will notify all members and subscribers whose profiles match the subject of your paper. The editor who has accepted your paper for publication will place if in the ACM digital library and will notify all members and subscribers whose profiles match the subject of your paper. Your paper will become immediately accessible to the world as part of the ACM literature. There will be no publication delay.
The copy of your work placed in the ACM digital library will be known and maintained as the definitive copy (reference copy) of your work. As part of the copyright transfer process after acceptance, you will be asked to transfer a copy to ACM in one of the several standard formats that ACM supports.
It is becoming standard to use links in the World-Wide Web (WWW) as a method of connecting components of works. This is already a new practice that was not contemplated at the time the ACM copyright policies were formulated. ACM encourages the widespread distribution of links to the definitive versions of ACM copyrighted works and does not require authors to obtain prior permission to include such links in their works.
A link is a string that, when interpreted by an appropriate program, will access an object elsewhere in a network and fetch a copy of it to the local machine. Examples are hypertext links, URLs (universal resource locators on the WWW ), and document handles. Under this definition, standard bibliographic citations can be links when processed by an appropriate intelligent agent.
In its copyright policies, ACM treats links as citations. As an author, you can create links to other objects on the Web without having to obtain prior permission from the copyright holders of the objects to which your links point. A reader who decides to use a link to obtain a copy will negotiate access with the copyright holder. For example, an ACM member may access an ACM copyrighted work for free, while others may have to pay a fee.
You may choose to embed a copyrighted object in your work rather than placing a link there. In that case, as in the past, you need to obtain the copyright holder's permission. You should inform the copyright holder that your work will always be distributed as a whole and that anyone who wants to extract the holder's component will be asked to get their own permission. At the location of the object in your work, you should include a notice "Included here by permission, © by <holder>. "
There is an exception to this rule. If you create a work whose pattern of links substantially duplicates a copyrighted work, you should get prior permission from the copyright holder. For example, if you decided to put together a "Table of Contents for the Current Issue of TODS" -- consisting of citations and active links to authors' personal copies of the articles in the latest issue of TODS -- you would need ACM permission since you are duplicating an ACM copyrighted work. If all the links in your "Table of Contents" pointed to the ACM definitive versions, ACM would probably give permission because then you are simply advertising ACM works. To avoid misunderstandings, it is best to consult with ACM before duplicating an ACM work with links.
Although this general scheme facilitates your work as an author, you should keep your reader constantly in mind. If your readers find it is expensive to use your work because you depend on links to expensive, copyrighted objects, your readers will be less inclined to read it. You will want to make sure that links point to copyright holders who charge nominal or no fees, and in some cases you will want to obtain prior permission from a copyright holder to include a link that can be exercised without fee. ACM intends to offer services that will help you with this, although such services are not yet available.
Service providers do not need to obtain prior permission from ACM to locate and dispense links to the ACM definitive versions of works, but they do need permission if they are making, collecting, or distributing copies of ACM copyrighted works.
You will undoubtedly want to store a personal copy of your ACM copyrighted work on a server in your organization. This will allow you access to it for reuse and will allow your organization to make internal distributions.
You may also have in mind that you can help your potential readers by giving them free access to your personal copy. If you do this, you are committing to provide a service to your readers that must be maintained for a long time. The problem with personal copies is they can easily become unavailable if you change jobs, your server changes names, the server crashes, and so on. Readers who link to your personal copy may find themselves suddenly and without warning unable to use the link. It will be to your advantage, as well as that of other authors who link to your work, to let ACM maintain the definitive copy; you need only to place a link to the ACM copy in your personal collection and to encourage all your readers to link the ACM copy. The ACM copy will be available continuously and cheaply in a familiar archive no matter where you are.
ACM offers the following guideline regarding your distributions of personal copies of your ACM copyrighted work. If the number of people who have access to the distribution is less than 1% of the ACM membership (currently, 1% is 800 people), you do not need prior permission for the distribution. If the number is larger, you should get permission from ACM and the copies should cite that permission.
When ACM grants permission to post ACM copyrighted works on non-ACM servers, ACM requires that the server prominently display a general notice alerting readers to their obligations under the copyright laws. A sample of such a notice appears in an accompanying box. You should make sure that any server on which you post ACM copyrighted versions of your works bears such a notice.
The documents contained in these directories are included by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a non-commercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
ACM plans to start accumulating definitive versions of works beginning in April 1995, and to gradually gather up and digitize copies of prior works. Until this archive is made accessible as the ACM digital library and is certified to be dependable, ACM will depend on authors and organizations to maintain the definitive versions. The ACM will make a general announcement to all authors when this time has come. Until that time, the 800 person guidelines will have no effect.