Partnering on Copyright

As well as self-archiving, you may publish in an Open Access journal or pay for your work to be made available through open access, an option which a number of subscription-based publishers are now offering.

Open Access Journals
The number of Open Access publishers and journals is increasing, with some 'traditional' publishers also beginning to set up Open Access journals. these.In order to identify possible appropriate Open Access journals look at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), or ask your colleagues who may already publish in such journals.

It is useful to recognise the different types of publishing arrangement that you may encounter, and compare these with those of the journals you publish in. This will thereby allow you to understand copyright issues and enable you to take control of copyright management in future.

As part of the JISC-SURF ‘Partnering on Copyright’ programme a report on Open Access journals and copyright was written. In this report, four different copyright policies used by Open Access journals were identified. These are described below.

Four model copyright practices, four different rights arrangements
A: The attribution licence: the author retains copyright but gives broad permission to use and reuse the article, including commercial use, (e.g., the two leading Open Access publishers PLoS and BioMed Central). The attribution licence is one of the Creative Comons licences. It lets others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.

Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organisation which has created various types of licences to allow the author to protect his or her work while encouraging its use in certain directions.

B: The exclusive licence: copyright may be retained by the author, but the commercial exploitation rights are transferred to the publisher through an agreement which may limit scholarly use to some extent. Authors may re-use their work without asking for permission from the publisher, as long as it does not involve commercial rights. Some publishers may state that authors wanting to re-use their work for commercial purposes must ask for permission.

There is little or no difference between an exclusive licence and full transfer of copyright, with the level of rights retained by the author depending on the particular publishing agreement. However, signing an exclusive licence is felt as more favourable than transferring copyright to the publisher as all rights that are not explicitly mentioned in the licence may stay with the author.

This model acknowledges the important revenue streams to publishers and learned societies which the copyright policy will protect.

C: The rights to re-use and transform articles are limited to Open Access licences. This model is again based on a Creative Commons licence, with a restriction put on reuse for commercial purposes, i.e., the ‘share alike’ clause.

Share Alike: If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.

Examples of journals which use such a licence are the European Geosciences Union (EGU) journals, published by Copernicus. These journals have print versions which are still subscription-based, and so commercial reuse of an article is restricted.

D: In this final model, all or most of the rights are reserved by the author rather than the publisher The copyright notice mentions that classroom use is free but other uses depend on the permission of the authors themselves. Such journals are mostly published by academics themselves, with no involvement from commercial publishers. Author fees are not normally requested and the journals appear in electronic form only. This is the most popular model among authors surveyed as part of the report on Open Access journals, as authors retain commercial exploitation rights.

Open access ‘author-pays’ models

In addition to Open Access journals, some of the traditional subscription-based journals are offering authors the option of making their research Open Access, while still requiring that authors transfer copyright to them. This option is based on the selective ‘author-pays’ model, which requires the academic, or someone on their behalf, such as a funding agency or HEI, to pay in the region of £1,250 to make their work immediately available online. In some cases this service is being subsidised. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and the commercial publisher Springer Verlag are two examples of such publishers offering an OA option. So far the number of OA articles published in this way seem to be limited, as this OA publishing model is still very much in the experimental phase.

Becoming familiar with the above copyright models will help to increase understanding and knowledge of copyright practices, not just in OA publishing, but in scholarly publishing in general, thereby enabling better copyright management.

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