Stephen Francoeur's Commonplace Book

Regarding Oxford University Press and efforts to make chapter contributors in edited books use a work-for-hire agreement. Pull quote: “The other thing that having these contributions classified as work for hire would prevent would be prior licenses. As more faculties adopt open access policies, which usually take the form of a prior license to the institution for repository deposit, the possibility arises of an eventual contest between a prior license contained in such a policy and a later transfer of the copyright through a publication contract. OUP may be test-driving an idea for avoiding that situation — if the faculty author is classified as a non-author by the work for hire doctrine, they would be unable to grant any prior licenses, since they never held any rights.”