Friday, August 03, 2012

Medical history: CUP breaching author's copyright? (cont.)

In an earlier post, I said I had written to CUP about two issues relating to an article that I wrote and of which I own the copyright,
  1. Their website's assertion that they own the copyright of my article, and 
  2. That they are bundling my Open Access article in a commercial package. 
Daniel Pearce, Commissioning Editor, HSS Journals at CUP has now written back a friendly and apologetic email letter, saying among other things,
I can confirm that an error has been made [...] in respect to the XML header files which accompany a subset of Medical History articles.  As a consequence, as you identify, our platform is currently displaying the incorrect copyright line for your article.  This is entirely unintentional.  It has never been our intention, and is not our intention now, to claim copyright over your article or the articles of any author in the same position as you.   To put this right we have requested a re-supply of XML as a priority and hope to be in a position to correct the copyright lines on all relevant articles on the live site today.  Naturally, we would like to issue an unreserved apology to you for this mistake.
I'm relieved about this, and glad that it has been possible to clear things up gracefully.
Mr Pearce will be writing to me again next week about question 2, when the people who know about these issues are back in the office.