Only Jonathan could combine open access and Father's Day and make it work. - Neil Saunders

he raises an interesting question about the inheritance of copyrights. Not sure what the timelimits are in the States but based on the pub list I guess Eisen senior died in 87/88 which would mean some years yet before the author copyright expired. But would that include the journal copyright as well? - Cameron Neylon

Well, the question is if there is any copyright to inherit in this case. My guess is that his father signed over the copyright to the publisher. - Lars Juhl Jensen

Almost certainly (unless as Jon suggests he qualified as a US government employee) but the copyright still runs out 30 years (or some other number) after death. The typsetting copyright will be separate but is usually a shorter period that starts after publication. - Cameron Neylon

One of the things that worries me about authors retaining copyright is precisely this potential limbo where no-one knows whether there is any copyright left. If the publisher's rights are limited then there is no option for making things available. For instance NPG retains an exclusive license for 'commercial publishing' - which could be intepreted to mean that they can't decide ever to give their back catalogue away - for instance if they went bust. - Cameron Neylon

It's a good point he makes about getting things off journals own sites and into places like PMC, for the sake of long term archival. Just today, I was unable to get some online supplementary data from a ~ 10 year old Blackwell article ... it was supposed to be on their site, but they've clearly broken the original published URL. It's irritating that many publishers, even with commercial incentives, can't be trusted to correctly and permanently archive these publications. What will be missing in 2018 ? - Andrew Perry

Andrew: I collect examples like that -- could you give me the actual reference? - Bill Hooker

The article citing the dead link is: Cristóbal et al (1999), EMBO J. 18, 2982–2990, (doi:10.1093/emboj/18.11.2982). The actual dead link is: http://www.blackwell-science.com/product... (which to complicate matters appears correct [but dead] in the PDF version but has an apparent typo dropping the "m" in "htm" in the online HTML version of Cristóbal). - Andrew Perry

It's supposed to link to some supplementary data for Berks (1996), Molecular Microbiology 22 (3) , 393–404 (doi:10.1046/j.1365-2958.1996.00114.x), but my institution doesn't seem to subscribe, so I can't check if the broken link is different in the original article. - Andrew Perry

Got it, thanks! - Bill Hooker