Community Rules and Etiquette
Thank you for being part of our community. To ensure the best possible experience for all members, we have established some basic guidelines for participation.
By joining and using this community, you agree that you have read and will follow these rules and guidelines. You also agree to reserve discussions and shared files and content to that best suited to the medium. This is a great medium with which to solicit the advice of your peers, benefit from their experience, and participate in an ongoing conversation. Questions should be directed to our member services department via the Contact Us link on this site.
Please take a moment to acquaint yourself with these important guidelines. If you have questions, contact SSP staff. In order to preserve an environment that encourages both civil and fruitful dialogue, we reserve the right to suspend or terminate membership in this community for anyone who violate these rules.
The Rules
- Respect others. Focus on the content of posts and not on the people making them. Please extend the benefit of the doubt to newer guests and members; there’s no such thing as a stupid question.
- Respect the purpose of the community. Topics of broad interest in the scholarly publishing community are welcome from anyone who wishes to contribute. Use the community to share successes, challenges, constructive feedback, questions, and goals instead of products or services that you provide. Discussions of products and services are acceptable in the context of a request for information or sharing of an experience. If you’ve found a product or service helpful, please share your experience with the group in a respectful way. Reasonable answers from service providers should address the question and should not be blatantly commercial. Creating artificial questions in order to spotlight products and services is a violation of these guidelines.
- Sending unsolicited advertisements of commercial products and services to the group, or to individual participants, or otherwise using the list as a source of prospective clients and customers, is not appropriate. Those who wish to advertise to SSP members are encouraged to contact our staff or the Development Committee to learn about advertising, exhibiting, and sponsorship opportunities.
- Press releases with newsworthy information of interest to SSP members should be directed to SSP’s editors, not posted on the Community. Editors may or may not choose to include them in the appropriate publications of SSP.
- Please direct job posting to SSP’s Career Center and not to the Community.
- Announcements of conferences, events, or other resources should be limited to the Industry Events and Announcements community. Such announcements may be posted if they are of broad interest to the community. SSP requests that organizations posting them provide reciprocal posting privileges for announcements of SSP conferences, events and resources.
- Use caution when discussing products. Information posted on the discussion groups and in the libraries is available for all to see, and comments are subject to libel, slander, and antitrust laws. U.S antitrust laws make it illegal for competitors or potential competitors to fix prices in any way. This prohibition applies to discussion of specific prices, costs, or rates. The financial and criminal penalties for violating this law are very serious.
- Community participants are prohibited from posting or transmitting any unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, profane, offensive, anticompetitive, or otherwise objectionable information of any kind, including, without limitation, any transmissions constituting or encouraging conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, or otherwise violate any local, state, national or international law. SSP does not condone and will not be responsible for any such materials or resulting liability, including antitrust liability. In no event will SSP be liable for any special, indirect or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of any information posted on this site.
- Community participants must not post any information protected by copyright without the permission of the copyright owner. By posting or responding to the Community, the sending party warrants and represents that it owns the copyright to such information, or has received permission from the person or entity who owns the copyright to such information. By posting information to the Community the posting party grants SSP and users of the Community the nonexclusive right and license to display, copy, publish, distribute, transmit, print, and use such information unless specifically indicated otherwise. Subject to the grant of this license, the posting party retains any other rights that the party may have to such information.
Discussion Group Etiquette
- Post your message or documents only to the most appropriate communities. This helps ensure all messages receive the best response by eliminating "noise."
- State concisely and clearly the topic of your comments in the subject line. This allows members to respond more appropriately to your posting and makes it easier for members to search the archives by subject. Using hashtags can help future users find your post when searching.
- Contributors should identify themselves and their affiliations when posting or responding to the discussions. In addition, participants should voluntarily disclose any conflict of interest they have with regard to a discussion in which they participate.
- Send messages such as "thanks for the information" or "me, too" to individuals, not to the entire list. Do this by using the "Reply to Sender" link in every message.
- Do not send administrative messages, such as “remove me from the list,” to the group. Instead, use the web interface to change your settings or to remove yourself from a list. If you are changing email addresses, you do not need to remove yourself from the list and rejoin under your new email address. Simply change your settings.
- Participation in certain communities is limited SSP members or sub-sets of SSP members. If you wish to share a post or thread outside the community, you should first seek permission from the other participants in the discussion thread before doing so.
The Legal Stuff
This site is provided as a service for the members of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. The Society for Scholarly Publishing is not responsible for the opinions and information posted on this site by others. We disclaim all warranties with regard to information posted on this site, whether posted by Society for Scholarly Publishing or any third party; this disclaimer includes all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall Society for Scholarly Publishing be liable for any special, indirect, or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data, or profits, arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of any information posted on this site. Community participants agree to defend, indemnify and hold SSP harmless from and against any damages arising out of or resulting from their online conduct in the Community.
Do not post any defamatory, abusive, profane, threatening, offensive, or illegal materials. Do not post any information or other material protected by copyright without the permission of the copyright owner. By posting material, the posting party warrants and represents that he or she owns the copyright with respect to such material or has received permission from the copyright owner. In addition, the posting party grants Society for Scholarly Publishing and users of this site the nonexclusive right and license to display, copy, publish, distribute, transmit, print, and use such information or other material.
Messages should not be posted if they encourage or facilitate members to arrive at any agreement that either expressly or impliedly leads to price fixing, a boycott of another's business, or other conduct intended to illegally restrict free trade. Messages that encourage or facilitate an agreement about the following subjects are inappropriate: prices, discounts, or terms or conditions of sale; salaries; profits, profit margins, or cost data; market shares, sales territories, or markets; allocation of customers or territories; or selection, rejection, or termination of customers or suppliers.
Society for Scholarly Publishing does not actively monitor the site for inappropriate postings and does not on its own undertake editorial control of postings. However, in the event that any inappropriate posting is brought to the attention of Society for Scholarly Publishing we will take all appropriate action. Society for Scholarly Publishing reserves the right to edit or delete all posts it considers inappropriate terminate access to any user who does not abide by these guidelines.
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