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On copyright policies and nonexistent journals

I mentioned before that I
had published a paper in an open-access journal that no longer exists on
cyberspace.

My question for you, my fellow pupae, is this: Am I still bound by this (now
non-existent) journal’s copyright policy?

I ask because I would like to post the published version of the paper in
question on PhilPapers and Academia.edu in order to make the paper available to
those who wish to read and/or cite it. (Believe it or not, there are those who
do. 🙂

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this…

Posted in

8 responses to “On copyright policies and nonexistent journals”

  1. Marcus Arvan

    Moti: Although I’m not an attorney, I can’t see how you could be. They’re not upholding their end of the publication contract.

    Reply
  2. Michael Falgoust

    I’m also not an attorney, but I wrote my dissertation on copyright, so I have some expertise.
    If it’s an open-access journal, does the copyright agreement even forbid self-archiving? When a colleague and I went about launching an open-access journal we used a Creative Commons license that would have allowed authors to post their articles on their own sites.
    In either case, if the journal is defunct, there’s no one to press a copyright claim, so you should be safe.

    Reply
  3. Moti Mizrahi

    Marcus and Michael: Thanks very much for sharing your thoughts and expertise. Since the journal’s website is down, I cannot review its copyright policy. I can’t say whether it was Creative Commons or something else. (The paper in question was published back in 2009.)

    Reply
  4. Ben Ricker

    Have you tried Google Cache? Paste in the following URL: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://example.com/
    Where you substitute out ‘example.com’ with the URL for the old site.

    Reply
  5. Ben Ricker

    Or you can try the Web Wayback Machine: http://archive.org/web/web.php

    Reply
  6. Moti Mizrahi

    Thanks for your helpful suggestions, Ben.
    I have found some archived pages of the journal on Archive.org. Thanks!
    Here’s what the journal’s website says about copyright:
    Copyright
    Submissions become the copyright of Philosophical Frontiers, once accepted for publication. Rejected papers remain the copyright of the author.
    Very informative, isn’t it?
    The website also says that past issues will be available on the DOAJ (http://www.doaj.org ). However, a quick search turns up noting on Philosophical Frontiers.
    Oh the perils of open access publishing.

    Reply
  7. Robert Seddon

    I would recommend contacting the former journal staff… except that I did once try to contact the former Assistant Chief Editor – who, at least at the time, was still listing the title on her institutional web pages – and got no reply. (I never published with them; I’m just a curious party.)
    When I looked at an article from the journal which someone had placed on PhilPapers, its pages stated copyright ownership by ‘Progressive Frontiers Press’, which has been wound up according to public records at Companies House. The former Chief Editor of the journal seems also to have been the Director and Secretary of Progressive Frontiers Press, so he’s the person to track down if you want to investigate what happened to its assets on dissolution, since copyrights would presumably count as assets of the company.

    Reply
  8. Moti Mizrahi

    Robert, thanks very much for the advice and helpful info.

    Reply

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