Making Articles Available Online

This is an appeal to my colleagues: Does anyone know the legality of making copies of articles one has published, either in a volume or a journal, available online? My assumption is that we are not allowed to do that, but given the medium of the blog and the limited access of some colleagues to resources I wondered if we might not be able to post our own articles on our own sites. So…does anyone know the law on this? (US, UK, internationally?)

This came up in the podcast we did among fellow bibliobloggers at SBL. We were discussing Kevin Wilson’s BibleWiki project at BlueCord.org and several of us have done dozens (well, a lot anyway) of little articles for Bible dictionaries and wondered how “original” we needed to be with our 3 sentence entry on “Zuzim” to make it different from an earlier published article in, say, Eerdman’s Bible Dictionary. 🙂

So, legal or otherwise, what opinions do you all have about such an endeavor?

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