Hess, Charlotte, and Andrew Revelle. 2005. "Copyright." The Common Property Resource Digest 72.

Abstract

"Authors often do not know much about copyright and simply hand over their rights to publishers. Typically a publisher will ask you to sign a copyright/license agreement. The documents purpose is to transfer to the publisher ownership of copyright in your work or otherwise convey to the publisher a bundle of rights, one of which is the right to publish your article. The right to self-archive the refereed postprint is a legal matter, because the copyright transfer agreement pertains to that text. But the pre-refereeing preprint is self archived at a time when no copyright transfer agreement exists and the author holds exclusive and full copyright. So publisher policy forbidding prior self-archiving of preprints is not a legal matter, but merely a journal policy matter.