Copyright transfer in group-authored scientific publications

Abstract

Academic publishers have different definitions of multiple authorship and ghost/guest authorship. When a scientific paper is submitted to a journal, the general assumption is that its ethics and authorship-related rules have been respected. Copyright transfer is a central issue in the flow of scientific information. To familiarize more academics with this topic, we examine the issue of copyright transfer from authors to a publisher. A key argument is the potential invalidation of a copyright transfer agreement if one or some of the co-authors do not authorize the transferring author to sign the agreement on their behalf.