hi Jodi,
the conferences I attend or follow (e.g. EGOS, AoM, APROS. SFAA) afaik do not typically require signed copyright notices at all, and if they do, the copyright is granted specifically for publishing in the proceedings, and legally resembles a license more, than a full copyright transfer. The problem with your copyright form, as I read it, is that ACM receives and retains all rights (which may be not welcome by some journal publishers, and you never know where eventually you're going to try to publish, so why risk?), and also that it does not specify journal articles as acceptable forms of future reusing the paper.
In fact, the copyright form is very similar to the forms used by journals (many of which allow publishing the article on a personal page or in future book works, if proper attribution is provided). This also may indicate to some possible attendants that WikiSym conference publication is an alternative to a journal publication.
In my field a conference paper does not count as a publication and is usually treated as a way of improving the paper before submitting it to a journal. Thus the possibility that you're going to use the paper almost verbatim in a journal submission is quite real. These differences possibly may result in WikiSym, as a conference and only in some disciplines, being less popular than it deserves.
best,
dariusz
On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 6:59 PM, Jodi Schneider jschneider@pobox.com wrote:
Hi Dariusz,
This is interesting, because if we can articulate problems in the copyright notice, we may be able to fix them. Currently, for WikiSym, the ACM Publications copyright form for proceedings is used:
*http://www.acm.org/publications/CopyReleaseProc-9-12.pdf* This includes:
- The right to reuse any portion of the Work, without fee, in future works
of the Author's (or Author's Employer's) own, including books, lectures and presentations in all media, provided that the ACM citation, notice of the Copyright and the ACM DOI are included ...
- The right to revise the work.
What is a typical copyright notice for conferences you *do* publish in? What rights do you need?
In computer science, typically a journal publication arising in part from a conference paper would include new results, or several papers would be combined.
-Jodi
On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 5:23 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak darekj@alk.edu.plwrote:
This is why conferences such as WikiSym are not very attractive for my field, as they require some copyright transfer (which may effectively make publishing in the final destination difficult).