Mash-up madness!

In which we muse on the implications of new copyright policy of the American Physical Society

Whilst trying to check the maximum article length for Applied Physics Letters, I stumbled across this:

When you submit an article to an APS journal, we ask you to sign our copyright form. It transfers copyright for the article to APS, but keeps certain rights for you, the author. We have recently changed the form to add the right to make ‘‘derivative works’’ that reuse parts of the article in a new work. 

This is rather exciting[1]: the APS has always given you the right to reprint figures for use in books, and for all co-authors to host a .pdf of papers on personal websites, this means you'll be able to use individual figures directly. [Also, it'll save the bother of clearing figures individually with APS, should you be writing a review chapter]

The editorial goes on to state that this will permit authors to create Wikipedia articles, which seems a bit passé, although I suppose it might raise the quality/quantity of the wikipedia physics articles.

[1] For a given value of "exciting", obviously...