 |
|
 |
Copyright: Overview
Open Access, and the localised archiving of research articles in institutional repositories (IRs), are moving the goalposts on the issue of copyright. If authors can be encouraged to retain their basic rights over their work, they can retain control over the way their work is accessed, used and re-used, including in IRs. While their basic rights must be balanced with those of publishers, it is still possible to change the rights culture in HEIs, empowering authors by placing them more in control of their work, and bringing enormous benefits to the entire community by making the fruits of research accessible to all. This section provides an overview of the key issues regarding copyright and intellectual property rights of authors which must be considered when IRs are set up.
Copyright is traditionally associated with exploitation rights (the reuse, republication, etc., of the work). For authors, negotiating a fair degree of control over these rights is key to exercising more control over how their work is accessed and, ultimately, used. However, these rights are often transferred (perceived to be ‘signed away’) to the publisher, significantly reducing the scope of the author or readers to reuse the research output in other contexts, such as textbooks or translation into another language. Nevertheless, copyright does not usually have to be retained in order for the work to be self-archived.
Stakeholders' basic rights
Authors' basic rights should include such fundamentals as the right to use their work in the institution in which they are working, in a classroom, lecture theatre or in an e-learning environment. But other issues should also be considered, including such uses as the right to self-publish on their home or departmental website (as in self-archiving), or to post to an IR. A publisher, meanwhile, will be looking to preserve their rights to storage of the work in a database, to re-use it in translations and anthologies, and to change the article’s physical appearance. A full list of both the author’s and publisher’s potential basic rights has been drawn up by the ‘Publishing Agreements’ project and can be found here.
The Zwolle Principles: balancing divergent rights
These two sets of rights need to be carefully balanced. It is in the interests of all stakeholders to have an effective and fair scholarly communication system and the rights and requirements of academics, publishers and HEIs should be reconciled and represented in publishing agreements and in self-archiving policies. To encourage this balance and mutual understanding, the so-called Zwolle Principles were created to help achieve maximum access to scholarly research without compromising on quality or denying the actual costs involved in publishing. All stakeholders, by understanding and managing copyright effectively, will be able to work together more actively towards the formulation and implementation of good copyright practices in the pursuit of wider dissemination and use of research.
Back to Top
Practical steps to help authors retain their rights
By retaining copyright, the author retains control: control over how their work is accessed, disseminated, used and re-used, including in an Open Access environment. There are a number of simple practical steps authors can take to retain their required rights, and they should be encouraged to:
Read any agreement carefully before signing
Talk to the publisher if their agreement seems restrictive – it is possible to negotiate an exception
Amend the copyright agreement signed
Support journals with liberal copyright agreement
Copyright and IRs/self-archiving
Even when exploitation rights are transferred to the publisher, in most cases the author does not have to retain the copyright in order to self-archive their articles. 93 per cent out of the 8603 journals processed by EPrints.org so far allow their authors to self-archive in some form. In the OA world, journals are colour-coded according to the degree to which their self-archiving policies are liberal or restrictive; a ‘green’ journal allows self-archiving of both post-prints and pre-prints, for example. This colour-coding is used in both the Copyright Knowledge Bank and SHERPA/RoMEO database, and is well known in the scholarly communications community, including publishers.
The Copyright Knowledge Bank database is an extension of the SHERPA/RoMEO database of publishers’ self-archiving policies, and contains information on more than 130 leading publishers, including those who publish Open Access journals. Both of these resources should provide the information you need to find out the copyright and self-archiving policies of journals and publishers, and to act on them.
Everyone in HEI management must be clear about copyright issues when establishing and maintaining an IR: rights management should be formally set out, enshrined in policies and procedures, and communicated to all stakeholders.
Back to Top
|
 |
