Partnering on Copyright

The Copyright Knowledge Bank is a very useful guide to publisher’s self-archiving policies, but it does not cover all of the smaller publishers (though more publishers are being added to the database all the time). In addition, self- archiving policies may still be vague, and copyright practice in flux. Some publishers do not formally support self-archiving but may consider a request to self-archive, with formal written permission being required.

Publishers may, therefore, still need to be contacted, either by the academic or, more commonly, by the IR administrator who may also deposit on behalf of academics. However, it is often not clear how to deal with publishers as there are many differences between them. This document gives advice on how to approach them for permission or clarification regarding self-archiving.

First, identify the type of publisher you are approaching; different types require a different tack. You may be dealing with:

• large commercial publishers
• learned societies
• university presses

Second, identify who best to contact. Some people are more sympathetic to the OA cause than others. Writing to a different person within the same publisher may sometimes get a more favourable response. Possible contacts include:

• editor of the journal
• person who deals with authors in general
• person who deals with the author’s copyright

In some instances, finding contact details is not straightforward. The best way to find the details of the ‘author editor’ is to go to the ‘author instructions’ page.

When dealing with large conglomerates, it is sometimes better to identify the journal groups and then look at who to contact for each group. For example, each country could have its own group. As a rule of thumb, when dealing with learned societies it is better to go through the author contacts, or, failing this, the company director.

In general, the best person to get in touch with is the author’s contact within the publisher, rather than the rights manager; publishers prefer to deal with the academics themselves regarding any copyright issues, rather than any third party.

Who should deal with the publisher?

It is often the case that an author's approach to the publisher is more successful than a third party's; a contract, after all, has already existed with the named individual (the academic in question), rather than a third party IR manager. Any intercession of the IR manager, therefore, needs to be handled with care. In some cases, e-mails from third parties, including IR administrators, go unanswered.

Remember too that IR administrators are chiefly working on behalf of and for the author, and the author's requirements should be paramount. If the author does not want the IR administrator to approach the publisher, those wishes should be respected, unless university policy states otherwise, in which case the process and decisions within it becomes part of the research support infrastructure and the environment in which the author works. But in the absence of policy, it has to be user-supported.

Useful resources

Some IR administrators have created text templates for academics to use when contacting publishers. Examples include the White Rose Consortium, and Cranfield University (not available online), both of which supply a form of words which their academic authors can use to request permission to post a published article on an IR. In both cases the publisher in question is Blackwell Publishing. SHERPA also provides a text template to form a letter to a publisher requesting permission to mount material on an IR.

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