What if the publisher forbids preprint self-archiving?
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 to that draft. So publisher policy forbidding prior self-archiving of preprints is not a legal matter, but merely a journal policy matter (just as it would be if the journal were to forbid the submission of papers by authors with blue-eyed uncles!). (It would become a legal matter — but a contractual matter, not a copyright one — if the author were to sign a contract explicitly stating that the unrefereed preprint had not been previously self-archived online. Obviously an author should strike such arbitrary stipulations out of any contract.) This policy goes by the name of the ” Ingelfinger Rule ,” originally invoked by the Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Franz Ingelfinger, in order
