Open Access

Open Access is the most important cross-disciplinary movement in academia right now.

Mike Taylor suggests that authors should take advantage of the gap between acceptance of a paper and copyright reassignment to allow researchers to publish in journals which have copyright transfer requirements and don’t allow open access. In that gap you can release to the public domain, which is irrevocable and voids any subsequent copyright transfer signing, or spread it as far and wide as you can under a Creative Commons licence. Unfortunately if many people do this, they may well close the gap by e.g. making authors sign a provisional transfer before the peer review stage.

Taylor has also used the trick of transferring copyright to his wife before publication so that the copyright is not his to transfer.