[Four postings: S. Morris, S. Arunachalam, T.B. Rajashekar, B. Mahon]
> Fred Friend wrote:
>
> If only authors did have the right to self-archive post-prints! Many of
> them (and we have all done it) have lost that right when they signed the
> publisher's copyright agreement. In order to self-archive post-prints
> authors have to retain copyright or retain that specific right to
> self-archive. Pre-prints can be self-archived without the publisher's
> agreement before the copyright agreement is signed.
According to our survey of 149 publishers, including *all* the largest
ones, more than 60% permit this, though the majority of these may only
permit posting on the author's own website (not that it makes much
difference, as Stevan has often pointed out)
It is not true that authors have to retain copyright in order to do this
- as the Zwolle Group (of which Fred is a member) has repeatedly pointed
out, it's not the copyright ownership that matters, but the allocation of
specific rights within copyright. Indeed the author might, in theory,
sign an agreement in which copyright was retained, but the right to
self-archive was not! The majority of publishers do, at this point,
require authors to assign copyright (though I think there is a gradual
change); however, many of these specifically permit the author to
self-archive in one way or another.
Perhaps some authors don't read the small print of the agreement they are
signing (or do read it, but don't bother to self-archive)?
Cox, J. & Cox, L. (2003) Scholarly Publishing Practice: The ALPSP
report on academic publishers' policies and practices in online
publishing. Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.
http://www.alpsp.org/2004pdfs/SFpub210104.pdf
Sally Morris
---------
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 03:55:49 +0100 (BST)
From: Subbiah Arunachalam <subbiah_a_at_yahoo.com>
Instead of talking in terms of per cent of publishers allowing authors to
place their preprints/ postprints in their own websites/ institutional
archives/ centralised archives, why cannot we publish a report listing
all journals and what they permit? Such a list could be updated every
week or every month. It can be circulated either through the BOAI list or
through the American Scientist Open Access Forum. Honestly, if you ask me,
I will not be able to tell you all the journals that will permit authors
to self archive their papers; I need to look around and find out. In fact,
my friend Dr T B Rajashekar, who set up the institutional archive at the
Indian Institute of Science wrote to several publishers to find out if
he could include papers published in their journals in the Institute's
archive, and many of them have replied.
Subbiah Arunachalam
MS Swaminathan Institute, Chennai
Trustee, Electronic Publishing Trust for Development
[Moderator's note: The Southampton group is negotiating with the
SHERPA/Romeo Project with a view to doing exactly what Arun is
suggesting! S.H.]
---------
From: Dr. T.B. Rajashekar <raja_at_ncsi.iisc.ernet.in>
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 11:42:56 +0530
We just followed up on the work done in The
RoMEO Project (Rights MEtadata for Open archiving)
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html. I
believe the project was funded for one year by JISC for the period (1
August 2002 - 31 July 2003). It has a very useful listing of publishers
who allow only preprint archiving, both preprint and postprint archiving,
etc. I am not sure if this list is being updated by the project group. We
simply identified from this list those who allow postprint archiving and
followed up on the publisher copyright page links to confirm the same,
before proceeding to find papers of our researchers in these journals.
T.B. Rajashekar
---------
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 12:23:21 +0100
From: Barry Mahon <barry.mahon_at_iol.ie>
Sally Morris wrote:
> The questionnaires were anonymous so I have no way of telling you what
> Elsevier's policy is.
I wondered why we should be interested in Elsevier's policy
specifically? Maybe somebody asked for that information and I didn't
notice but I don't think one publishers policy should be categorised
specifically as against any other policy.
Barry Mahon
Received on Thu Apr 01 2004 - 18:34:48 BST