What is the copyright status of materials submitted to CVonline?
As far as I know, there are 2 issues, but there are no clear answers:
Because of the ease of copying of electronic materials, there is always a problem with www pages. I do not believe that the legal status is well settled.
The materials connected in CVonline are either donated source, or material still on their owner's machine. This means that the owners have either made their materials freely public, or retain control themselves.
My view is that these pages are donated to the public for educational purposes and that no one is obtaining personal financial gain (though perhaps some gain to their reputation). I cannot imaging anyone other than students and researchers using CVonline - it's not the sort of thing that is going to make a lot of money for people.
This depends on what rights you may have assigned in the publication process. If your contribution is a paper published elsewhere, you are likely to have assigned some rights, but might have retained your electronic dissemination rights. You should read the contract.
As with other academic materials, the holders of the copyrights (i.e. usually a journal) are usually happy to allow reuse of a text in other media, provided that you acknowledge the journal (as that gives them publicity).
All I have ever had to do is write the journal asking for permission to use the text and they have written back quickly with approval.
© 2007 robert fisher