Abstract
Academic publishers have different definitions of multiple authorship and ghost/guest authorship. When a scientific paper is submitted to a journal, the general assumption is that its ethics and authorship-related rules have been respected. Copyright transfer is a central issue in the flow of scientific information. To familiarize more academics with this topic, we examine the issue of copyright transfer from authors to a publisher. A key argument is the potential invalidation of a copyright transfer agreement if one or some of the co-authors do not authorize the transferring author to sign the agreement on their behalf.
Highlights
Authorship is of great importance in science publishing and has multiple functions,[1] including intellectual contribution for the research conducted,[2] and responsibility and accountability for the published work,[3] as a currency for the quality of the published research and as credit for the authors as they advance their scientific careers.[4]
The issue of whom a publisher accepts as the owner of copyright at the time of signing the copyright transfer agreement (CTA) reflects on how publishers safeguard or protect ‘appropriate authorship’ and we argue that this should be the most central aspect of the validity of CTAs in academic publications
We limit our discussion to journals and publishers that request the transfer of copyright ownership and we focus on copyright protection using the term ‘joint authorship’
Summary
Academic publishers have different definitions of multiple authorship and ghost/guest authorship. When a scientific paper is submitted to a journal, the general assumption is that its ethics and authorship-related rules have been respected. Copyright transfer is a central issue in the flow of scientific information. To familiarize more academics with this topic, we examine the issue of copyright transfer from authors to a publisher. A key argument is the potential invalidation of a copyright transfer agreement if one or some of the co-authors do not authorize the transferring author to sign the agreement on their behalf. Keywords collaboration; copyright; ethics; guest; ghost and gift authorship; joint authorship
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