Michal Szkudlarek wrote:sorry for offtopic but im curious what is your field of study.
do i remember correctly that you are a physicist? what subfield are you into?
A difficult question. For a quarter of a century I had been a solid-state physicist. Actually,
a many-body theoretician doing theoretical solid-state physics. For the last ten years I've
been a theorist in atomic and molecular physics.
Guillaume Gomard wrote:I think it depends on what you want to do with the paper, many journals are OK if you
distribute the paper without selling it.
What you want in the first place is to PUBLISH the paper, and (at least in my field of science) this
ROUTINELY implies transferring the copyright to the journal. After that, I can privately distribute
it to whoever might be interested, but I certainly can not and do not SELL it. The problem is that
I am not allowed to "reuse" it for further publications - up to a point, of course (see below.)
Also for the figures, I guess it's fine to reuse them provided that you slightly change the
font size, the color or style of your curves, etc.
Well, more or less, depending on the criteria of particular journals, and what they understand
as “slightly” vs. “substantially”. It’s not so rigorous, after all, and not difficult to guess what's
acceptable and what isn't. Decent people respect that, even without any official "percentages".
Some others don't.
What maybe isn't fair, but is ultimately human, the "decent guys" never get praised for respecting
the stated rules, but the "bad guys" also very, very seldom get punished for breaking them. (Quite
unlike the official, very strict rules regarding fieldherping in some countries... but that would bring
us back to a different topic, where everything has already been said.)