TITLE: Publishing journals articles without transferring copyright.
QUESTION [45 upvotes]: I'm a grad student getting close to submitting my first journal article (which will be single-authored). My understanding is that it's standard practice for authors to transfer the copyright of their paper to the journal in which it is published. I want my article to be published in a journal, but I don't want to transfer the copyright -- I want the article to be in the public domain. How will editors to behave towards such a request? Also, when should I bring up the topic: when I submit the article, or after it's accepted and I'm asked to sign a copyright transfer?
Some grants apparently have a stipulation that articles written as part of the grant research must be released into the public domain (e.g. grants funded by the US government). In this case, authors presumably sign a consent to publish, instead of a copyright transfer. Hence, there's at least some precedent for what I want to do, though I want my article in the public domain purely because of my personal views on the ethics of copyright.
I couldn't find too much information about this topic by googling. Oleg Pikhurko has a page discussing his attempt to have his articles revert to the public domain after a period of years, as opposed to instantly. It didn't work out particularly well in his case.
I'm not sure how much I'm willing to have my ethical ideals damage my career (e.g. by having publications delayed and/or being banned from submitting to journals).

REPLY [16 votes]: I would not advise you to give up your ethical ideals.  Frankly, I find it offensive that any publishers expect me to assign to them the copyright in an article that I have written.
I think there are also some practical reasons to retain copyright, although they are not as pressing now that we can put our papers on the arXiv (which you should, in my opinion, always do).  Kevin's addendum form mentions some of the important rights that some copyright transfer forms might take away from you: the right to create derivative works, use portions of the article in other work, and distribute the final version on the web.
The best solution is, obviously, to publish in journals that always allow the author to retain copyright.  Such journals often also have other desirable features, e.g. they make their published articles freely available online, rather than charging huge sums of money to university libraries for subscriptions.  Furthermore, publishing good work in these "friendly" journals helps to build up their acceptance in the community, so that future authors will feel less pressure from career considerations to publish in "unfriendly" journals.
Of course, right now it is still the case that some of the "best" journals (in terms of building up your publication record) are "unfriendly".  How far you are willing to compromise between ethical ideals and career considerations is a personal decision.  My personal choice so far has been to publish in any journal, but insist on retaining copyright.  I've had more luck with this than Pikhurko did so far; out of two publications in "unfriendly" journals, in both cases the publisher was willing to allow me to retain copyright (although they have a bit of trouble actually putting the correct copyright notice on the article).