Replies

• 1

  Hilary Spencer

  07 October 2009 | 17:21

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  Hi Kah-Wai,

  Copyright does not protect ideas, per se, but only the expression of those ideas. This means that you own the copyright in your written / typed manuscript (e.g. your words), but you cannot own any abstract concepts. You may find the following article at BitLaw to be helpful in explaining this distinction: http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/unprotected.html#ideas

  If you post a manuscript on Nature Precedings, you continue to own the copyright in your manuscript. You agree to only to license your work to Precedings and other readers to permit the display and downloading of your work. (You do not transfer the copyright.) We currently use the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which also requires anyone using/re-using your work to also cite your work and credit you appropriately. When you publish your article in a journal, you will then also agree to license the article to that journal, usually under a different license agreement. Occasionally, the licenses for some journals are incompatible with posting a manuscript on Nature Precedings. The Sherpa/RoMEO project provides links to many journal’s policies and license agreements.

  Hope that helps!

  Hilary

• 2

  David Bickel

  09 October 2009 | 11:20

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  Hi Kah-Wai,

  While copyright law does not protect your idea, the scientific community would frown upon any readers who took your idea from the preprint and presented it as their own idea. In that sense, ethical norms regarding plagiarism give you some protection that copyright law does not.

  David