[WikiEN-l] copyright question: concerning the use of scientific articles

Wed Oct 26 12:45:44 UTC 2005

You probably don't need to copy that many sentences verbatim --
articles on far more complicated/tenacious subjects are possible
without that sort of copying. Use of attributed paraphrasing in this
case is a better approach. Take a look at other articles of this sort
for examples of this (i.e. [[Gold foil experiment]], which was
recently cleaned up and made into a pretty nice little article).

Anyway. You can't use *any* sentences from another publication unless
they are *quotes*, and quotes should only be an insubstantial amount
of the original text anyway so they qualify as "fair use".

It should be noted, however, that "scientific facts" themselves are
*not* copyrightable (that is, you don't have to ask permission to
print the speed of light, even if a new number for it came out
yesterday). But in this instance I'm not sure that caveate applies.

My suggestion: write the article, using quotes from the original
article. Then submit it to peer review and say, "I want to cut down
some of the direct quotation used, but I'm not sure ofthe best way to
do it. Can you help?" My bet is that somebody will be able to refactor
it in a nice way.

FF

On 10/26/05, Uwe Brauer <oub at mat.ucm.es> wrote:
>
>
> Hello
>
>
> Sorry if this article gets posted twice, but I presume my subscription
> was not complete when I sent the following article.
>
>
> I am not sure whether this is the right list to ask, if not could
> somebody please point out to me the appropriate one.
>
> I want to write an article which relies heavily on scientific
> publications. (I will of course cite the relevant articles at the end
> of `my' wikipedia article). What I have in mind is a summary of their
> work, maybe one of ten sentences copied literally. Do I need the
> permissions of the authors of these article (one author is already
> dead) or could I avoid that problem in simply not copying even a
> single sentence verbatim?
>
>
> Or without their explicit permission I simply could not write about
> the subject?
>
>
> Thanks and regards
>
> Uwe Brauer
>
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