Melissa Kaplan's
Herp Care Collection
Last updated January 1, 2014

Copyright Protection of Online Sources

Melissa Kaplan, 1996

General Copyright Information
My Rights
Citations

General Copyright Information
All published work, regardless of the medium in which it was published, is considered by law to be copyrighted by the author. It is important that all such articles and references to them be attributed to the author and source. For more information, please see the Citations section on how to properly cite sources found online and off.

Replications of My Articles At Your Website
I do not give permission for my articles to be replicated at anyone else's site.

I am regularly adding articles to this site and updating existing articles. I do not give permission for any of my articles, caresheets or other resources to be replicated at other websites. If you wish to provide your site visitors access to my articles or resources I've compiled, you may put a link only to my main site (Anapsid.org) or to a specific article or other page at my site rather than upload the material itself to your site. In this way, the people accessing your site will have access to the most up-to-date information that appears at my site, as well as links to related articles at my site that I have embedded in many articles. Any other use requires written permission from me. Other than than the translations of my articles appearing on sites linked to my Translations page, no one has been given permission by me to replicate my material at their site.

Articles by other authors that appear at my site must have their name and original publication source material cited. If you aren't sure how to cite online sources, see Citations; for print media, check out standard bibliography formatting in standard references such as the MLA or APA.

If I find that you have replicated my articles at your site, I will request that you remove them and replace them with a link to my Anapsid.org site or to that specific article at my site. If my request goes unheeded, I will refer the matter to your ISP. The same goes for articles of mine being passed off as your work (i.e., no attribution or an attribution indicated it was written by someone other than me or the original author), or the work of others. ISPs and commercial carriers such as AOL, Geocities, Yahoo and other website providers take a dim view of plagiarism and copyright infringement and they will shut your site down if you do not accommodate reasonable author requests.

Author Attribtion
The author name and copyright date appears under the title and subtitle of every article. When known possible, the original print or online source is attribited.

Paper/Hardcopy Reprints
I allow one-time hardcopy reprint rights to nonprofit organizations such as herpetological societies and rescue groups who want to run one of my articles in their newsletter. If you are interested in publishing one of my articles in your members-only newsletter, you may do so, so long as you give proper attribution (see the Citations section for proper attribution formatting).

If you wish to give a printed hardcopy of an article to your pet store or vet, you may do so providing the attribution information is included.

If you are a pet store, breeder or other vendor and wish to give out copies of my care articles when making a sale or helping customers decide whether a particular reptile is what they are looking for care-wise, you may makes copies of the article to give to the customers so long as the attribution information (such as "Copyright Melissa Kaplan, www.anapsid.org) is included on each copy.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Want an Anapsid.org banner or graphic for your links page?

Hardcopy Reprints and Attributions
I allow one-time reprint rights to nonprofit organizations such as herpetological societies and rescue groups. If you are interested in publishing one of my articles in your members-only newsletter, you may do so, so long as you give proper attribution (author, copyright date, and the www.anapsid.org web address). Acceptable forms generally adhere to the formats in the Citations section.

If there is, in an article by another author at my site, an email link to that author's name, you need to contact that author first and ask their permission to reprint their article in any form other than as specified here. You should ask them at that time if, granting they allow you to reprint the article, whether they want their email address published (or linked to their name in an online newsletter) and whether they have their own website they would like you to also mention. Some of the authors have are no longer at the email addresses at which I originally contacted them and I have not been able to locate a newer one for them. If you use those articles, you still need to provide proper attribution.

A Note To Newsletter Editors
If you are a herp society newsletter editor and you aren't already requiring proper attribution information from members who submit articles from other publications or the internet for you to include in your newsletter, start retraining them.

If you aren't already properly citating sources for the articles you copy from other publications or the Internet, you should be doing so.

It doesn't matter if your society isn't one of the big, nationally known organizations. Using citations, once people get into the habit of looking for them and using them, is a wonderful way that you can help expand your members' knowledge base by providing this very useful tool to to enable them to find more information on the subjects about which you are publishing articles. Not to speak of proper attribution just being the ethically right thing to do.

Citation
If you ever had to write a term paper in middle school or high school, you should have a basic understanding of citations. Teachers often have a format they prefer. Organizations and associations that publish journals, papers and proceedings have their preference. If you complete a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation, your adviser or department decides what style manual--and citation style--you will use.

I'm not that picky. If I give you permission to reprint one of my articles, just make it clear who wrote the article, when it was written, and where your readers can find it. The easiest way to do the latter is to just put in the main www.anapsid.org address.

The following are acceptable formats for citing online sources.

by Author's Name
©YEAR
www.anapsid.org

by Author's Name
©YEAR Originally published online at www.web.address/subdirectory/actualfilename.html

©YEAR. Author's Name. Anapsid.org

More information and styles for both online, print and other sources may be found at the UIUC's Guide to Style Manuals

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