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Subject:A small Christmas gift from STC: copyright reform From:Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca> To:TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Mon, 19 Dec 2005 10:14:27 -0500
Over the years, there's been a fair bit of talk about STC, both pro and
con, and one practice that drew some fire from professional writers was
STC's copyright policy: Like most journals and commercial publishers,
STC required authors to assign copyright to their work to STC.
This past fall, I proposed a change in this policy to the new STC
board, and submitted a business case for changing the policy to
something that explicitly recognized the importance of this
intellectual property to professional communicators, and that would
hopefully set a good example for other publishers to follow. You'll be
pleased to hear that I succeeded, with the help of John Hedtke, one of
the new board members. (John helped me draft the proposal, added his
own input, and presented it to the Board.)
The Board unanimously accepted my proposal, and STC now requests only
two rights from authors: one-time print and one-time online rights.
Effectively, this means that they request only the rights they need to
publish our materials, but not to republish them (e.g., in a future
"best of" anthology) without our permission. Better still, the December
issue of _Intercom_ specifically states (on the Table of Contents page)
that copyrights to all articles are held by the authors, not by STC.
So if you've been reluctant to publish with STC because you (quite
reasonably) refused to assign your copyright, you can consider that
obstacle to publication removed. Indeed, I encourage you to publish
with STC; I've had many wonderful discussions with my readers over the
years, and isn't that why we write?
Also note that if you're one of the people who criticize STC for an
unwillingness to change or ignorance of the needs of its members, you
now have at least one strong example that undermines this belief.
You'll need to ask a Board member to bring your proposal before the
Board and champion it, but in my experience, the current Board is very
open to good suggestions that consider all the pros and cons, and as
the copyright proposal demonstrates, they're very willing to accept and
quickly implement the good proposals.
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