When authors submit a manuscript to Semantics & Pragmatics, which they will very soon be able to do, they will have to agree to our Publication Agreement. In essence:

• they’ll declare that the article is their original work,
• they’ll allow us to publish the article under a Creative Commons license, which will allow users to freely share the article but won’t allow them to change the article, derive commercial benefit from it, or distribute it without attribution,
• they’ll retain full copyright on the article,
• they’ll agree to credit S&P for first publication if they republish the article elsewhere (in a collection of their work, for example).

Below the cut is a draft of what the submission process will say about this. In the preparation of this agreement, we found two documents especially helpful: a model Science Commons publication agreement and the agreement used by The Australasian Journal of Logic. We re-used quite a bit of the language from those documents. We might get some further directions from an LSA working group on scholarly copyright, but we don’t know whether that will come in time for our first publication agreements. We’re pretty happy with what we have, but certainly would welcome any feedback prospective authors might have.

Please email the text of this agreement, filled in with the title of the manuscript and your name(s) and with your electronic signature, to the editors at editors@semprag.org. We will return the text with our signature as part of our formal acceptance of your article for publication in “Semantics and Pragmatics”.

PUBLICATION AGREEMENT AND COPYRIGHT LICENSE

This is a publication agreement and copyright license (“Agreement”) regarding a written manuscript currently entitled, ___________________, (manuscript title) (“Article”) to be published in “Semantics and Pragmatics” (the “Journal”). The parties to this Agreement are: ____________ (corresponding author), _____________ (individually, or if more than one author, collectively, “Author”), and the publishing editors of “Semantics and Pragmatics”, (“Publisher”).

1. The Author has created and owns the copyright to the Article.

2. The Author represents and warrants that s/he has the full power and authority to enter into this Agreement and to grant the rights granted in this Agreement. The Author represents and warrants that the Article furnished to the Publisher has not been published previously. For purposes of this paragraph, making a copy of the Article accessible over the Internet, including, but not limited to, posting the Article to a database accessible over the Internet, does not constitute prior publication so long as such copy indicates that the Article is not in final form, such as by designating such copy to be a “draft,” a “working paper,” or “work-in-progress”.

3. The Author and the Publisher agree that the Author may grant a Creative Commons copyright license in the Article to the general public, in particular a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, which is incorporated herein by reference and is further specified at
   http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode (human readable summary at
   http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0).

4. The Author grants to the Publisher a royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide nonexclusive license to publish, reproduce, display, distribute, and use the Article in any form, either separately or as part of a collective work, including but not limited to a nonexclusive license to publish the Article in the Journal, its electronic archive, its paper archive, or any collection of the Journal’s works in any form whatsoever, copy and distribute individual reprints of the Article, and authorize reproduction and distribution of the Article or an abstract thereof by means of computerized retrieval systems.

5. The Author retains ownership of all rights under copyright in the Article, and all rights not expressly granted in this Agreement.

6. The Author agrees that s/he shall not publish the Article in any other journal or edited collection, whether electronic or otherwise, in substantially the same form as the Article, without acknowledging prior publication in the Journal.

7. This Agreement shall become effective and binding at the date of formal acceptance of the Article for publication by the Journal.

I HAVE READ AND AGREE FULLY WITH THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT.

Author:

Signed: _____________ Date: ___

Publisher:

Signed: _____________ Date: ___