In higher education today there are many calls
for change in the scholarly communication process.
A number of alternative publishing models
are being advocated in the hope of counteracting
ever-increasing journal price increases. One
suggestion is that academics ‘self-archive’ their
research papers either by making them available
on their own web pages, or by submitting them
to an institutional repository or a subject-based
archive (e.g. ArXiv, CogPrints). It is argued that
self-archiving will ‘free’ the research literature
from expensive ‘toll-gate’ access, thus offering
academics greater visibility and impact for their
work....[There follows a short description of the self-archiving process.] Seems straight forward? Unfortunately not. In
fact, the whole process is encumbered with rights
issues that could hamper the success of the movement.
It is these issues that the RoMEO (Rights
metadata for open archiving) project has been
funded by the JISC’s FAIR programme to identify
and address.
From the conclusion:
The aim of the RoMEO project is to ensure that
copyright issues do not hinder the development
of author self-archiving via institutional repositories.
It hopes to do this by assessing the key
rights issues for each stakeholder group through
a series of surveys, and by making recommendations
that address those issues. The project team
would be grateful if readers would advertise the
surveys (available [here])
as widely as possible to relevant parties in their
institution.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/14/2003 02:32:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
