Rights issues and the printed word

In the digital era one might perhaps be forgiven for wondering whether we should be devoting time to rights issues in connection with the printed word. Indeed, anyone attending for the first time one of the various meetings and seminars of STM – the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, could be forgiven for thinking that the era of the printed word is all but over, as more and more publishers of STM journals make their publications on line, either via their own servers or through a variety of intermediaries including commercial document delivery services, the British Library Document Supply Centre and so on. I myself do not represent a major publisher of journals, but I am well aware that many users in the academic and commercial world undoubtedly do want material appropriate to their own interests delivered in electronic form; they would also prefer supply either via a one stop shop, or, if material is delivered direct from publishers, a service so seamless that they do not have to deal with a variety of different access systems. This raises many issues including watermarking, fingerprinting and secure methods of electronic payment. However, the fact remains that much academic and professional material is still being published in traditional print on paper form, and I will in this paper examine some of the rights issues which face publishers when they seek to contract with authors for publication. It is certainly a fact that over the last seven or eight years, we have had to devote far more attention to improving our contracts with authors, both for full-scale book publication and for the commissioning of individual chapters or articles for our publication. When I first Learned Publishing (1998) 11, 271–275