Chapter under a Creative Commons License
I just got a final note from the Editor of the book i have an chapter in - Research and Theory in Advancing Spatial Data Infrastructure Concepts. Harlan Onsrud went through great pains to negotiate a special license for this ESRI publication and here is the relevant part of his note:
ESRI has copyright in the collection of articles as a whole but you retain copyright in your own article subject to a Creative Commons license.
The final published version of your article has been posted on the GSDI 9 Proceedings web site. Feel free to download it and distribute or post it as you please.
This is really exciting! As an academic to be able to hold the rights to one’s published work is rare! We mostly write for free, I have yet to be paid for any of my academic publications, peer reviewed or otherwise and to date I only know one person who is getting paid for a book deal and he is an architecture prof. So the least we should be given is the rights to our published work. Most of us new academics do not have the clout to debate with publishers as the stakes are set up in such a way that it is publish or perish. So we wind up relying on more senior proffesors to trail blaze for us. In this case Harlan also happens to be well versed in the law. Further, the content of this book is for development, and it just makes sense that this content be made as accessible as possible. Thanks Harlan!
So folks go read the stuff as it it quite good and if you really like it buy the book. As a prof you can get your students to acquire the book and then access the articles online. You can get access to great material here. My chapter is this one.
