the things you learn...

[cellio]

Somebody asked a question on Writers about batch-converting document reference numbers (like ISBNs but for papers, not just books) to full citations, which sounded like a "simple matter of programming web services", so I did a little poking around. I have a (single) peer-reviewed publication, so I looked up its reference number (DOI) to test with.

That's how I found out that I have two publications. Er, what? Apparently that paper ended up in a book several years later, and apparently the process of doing that calls for neither permission from nor notification to authors. Or at least second-string authors; maybe the lead author was involved. (I wouldn't know; I haven't interacted with him in ages.) It's a paper in computational linguistics; I was just the (main) programmer, not the linguist or the PhD.

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I suppose I can understand that as a conventional practice. Academic papers can have long strings of second-string authors, and the logistics of tracking all of them down for republication would be daunting. From a copyright point of view, apart from whatever any specific contract may have said (and I suspect if there was a contract, it allowed for this), my recollection is that co-authors of a work all retain the right to re-use without the need for explicit permission. (Obviously, that situation would be over-ridden by any specific contractual limitations or rights assignments.)

[cellio]

This was work in the course of employment, too, so they might have only had to ask the company and not any of the individuals. Not being in academia myself I don't have instincts for how this sort of thing works. Tracking down every author on every paper to be included in a book sounds like a big task.

Now I want to see the book. :-)