Copyright transfer agreement
[5][10] The situation in which authors hold the copyright usually involves considerable effort in the form of correspondence and record keeping and often leads to unnecessary delays."[5] This means that no one, including the authors, can reuse text, tables, or figures in other publications without first getting permission from the new copyright owner.[dubious – discuss] This serves as a lesson that a "writing" required by the Copyright Act need not necessarily be "clear", but may contain ambiguous language which can be interpreted by course of dealing by third parties to the alleged transaction.[23] The transfer and ownership of copyright represents a delicate tension between protecting the rights of authors, and the interests – financial as well as reputational – of publishers and institutes.[24] With OA publishing, typically authors retain copyright to their work, and articles and other outputs are granted a variety of licenses depending on the type.[26] This might in part explain why authors in scientific research, in contrast to all other industries where original creators get honoraria or royalties, typically do not receive any payments from publishers at all.Such fundamental conceptual violations are emphasised by the popular use of sites such as ResearchGate and Sci-Hub for illicit file sharing by academics and the wider public.[32][33][34][35][36] Factually, widespread, unrestricted sharing helps to advance science faster than paywalled articles, thus it can be argued that copyright transfer does a fundamental disservice to the entire research enterprise.[37] It is also highly counter-intuitive when learned societies such as the American Psychological Association actively monitor and remove copyrighted content they publish on behalf of authors,[note 3] as this is seen as not being in the best interests of either authors or the reusability of published research and a sign of the system of copyright transfer being counterproductive (because original creators lose all control over, and rights to, their own works).