The IEEE requires transfers of copyright from the authors to the IEEE. The Copyright Page of the IEEE Home Page contains an electronic version of the IEEE Copyright Form (in HTML, PDF, MS Word and WordPerfect file formats). Authors must submit a single paper copy of this form, completed, with their contribution.

It may be helpful to clarify the area of authors' reuse rights of material copyrighted by the IEEE. Normally, whenever another publisher approaches the IEEE for rights to republish IEEE-copyrighted material, a standard republication fee is required of the publisher. For the August 1996 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Education, the IEEE Education Society asked, and received, permission to have this particular requirement for a republication fee waived for the authors (only).

Many questions about copyright issues are addressed in the IEEE Copyright Policies for the New Publishing and Communications Technologies. The following excerpts are especially important for contributors:

Hard Copy Preprints

A hard copy preprint may be an article which an author and/or company wishes to distribute, but which either 1) has been only recently submitted for review, or 2) has been reviewed and accepted but not yet published. Hard copy preprints must carry the following notice on the first page of the reproduction:

This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version will be superseded.*

Electronic Preprints

Upon submitting an article to the IEEE for review and possible publication, the author must add the following notice to the first screen of any of his/her posted electronic preprint versions of the paper:

This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.*

When IEEE accepts the work for publication, the author must add the IEEE copyright notice [shown under Copyright Notice, below] to any previously posted electronic versions of the particular paper submitted and provide IEEE with the electronic address (URL, ftp address, etc.) of the primary electronic posting.

When IEEE publishes the work, the author must replace the previous electronic version of the accepted paper with either 1) the full citation to the IEEE work or 2) the IEEE-published version, including the IEEE copyright notice and full citation. Prior or revised versions of the paper must not be represented as the published version.

Personal Servers

This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. *

Copyright Notice

The following copyright notice must be displayed on the first page of any hard copy reproduction of the IEEE-copyrighted material or on the initial screen displaying the IEEE-copyrighted material electronically:

©199x IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

Questions about Copyrights

Questions about copyright issues should be directed to:

William J. Hagen, Manager
Copyrights and Trademarks
IEEE Service Center
445 Hoes Lane
Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331
phone: 908 562-3966
fax: 908 981-8062
email: w.hagen@ieee.org