Copyright rules for academic paper abstracts

[kristopher]

The post at the link below was flagged as being in violation of DU copyright rules. I added a line explaining that the flagged content was an abstract from a peer reviewed paper and as such its use was compliant with copyright law.
The post was deleted.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=270531&mesg_id=270643

From wiki, "Academic literature uses the abstract to succinctly communicate complex research. An abstract may act as a stand-alone entity instead of a full paper. As such, an abstract is used by many organizations as the basis for selecting research that is proposed for presentation in the form of a poster, platform/oral presentation or workshop presentation at an academic conference. Most literature database search engines index only abstracts rather than providing the entire text of the paper. Full texts of scientific papers must often be purchased because of copyright and/or publisher fees and therefore the abstract is a significant selling point for the reprint or electronic form of the full text<1>.

Abstracts are protected under copyright law just as any other form of written speech is protected. However, publishers of scientific articles invariably make abstracts publicly available, even when the article itself is protected by a toll barrier."

In this case the abstract and the entire article are made freely available for viewing or download by the author of the paper. The links to both were included in the deleted post.

Could you address this for future reference as it is common practice everywhere I'm aware of to use the abstract from such papers to provide an author approved summary of the original work.

[Skinner]

1. The DU rules say a maximum of four paragraphs for copyrighted work.

Obviously, this is not a perfect approach. But given the fact that all of our content is user-generated, we feel that the best way to enforce copyright is to give everyone a clear standard. This is an easy guideline for members to follow, and it is easy for moderators to enforce.

You were given one good-faith opportunity to edit your post, which I think is more than fair.