How to address copyright
26 February 2010
Researchers are to ensure that their publishing agreement allows the research article to be deposited in the open access institutional or subject (disciplinary) repository.
Making "best efforts" implies taking the following actions:
- Determining the journal policy on open access by seeking information on the publishing models and copyright/licensing policies of the journal(s) to which the article is submitted. The RoMEO database (Publisher's copyright & archiving policies www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.html) can be used to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.
- Requesting and reading carefully the publishing agreement that publishers expect the author to sign at the beginning of the submission/publication process. This agreement sets out the rights and obligations of both the author and the publisher. From this document can be seen if authors can retain the right to deposit a research paper (self archive their work) or not.
- If the publishers' policy conflicts with the European commission’s grant agreement, authors should inform the publisher of the European Commission's special clause on open access and request an exception to the publishers' policy to allow the author to comply with this clause. A template letter for this is available from OpenAIRE, or the EC. Options include:
- License to publish: authors retain their copyrights while granting publishers a sole license for certain copyright related acts which have an economic or commercial objective. By keeping their copyrights, authors can retain certain rights for various scholarly purposes including self-archiving.
- Amending the publishing agreement through the introduction of a clause or an addendum stipulating that while assigning their copyrights authors retain certain rights (e.g. the right to self-archive their work in an institutional or subject based repository immediately upon publication).
Models for these options can be found at the following websites:
- SPARC Author Addendum: http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.shtml;
- Science Commons / SPARC Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine: http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/
- Copyright toolbox developed by SURF and the JISC: http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/authors/.
If negotiations are unsuccessful, researchers should consider submitting to another journal.
If they cannot comply with special clause 39, grant recipients should inform the Commission and provide publisher’s letter of refusal.
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