Open Access News

There is a growing national and international movement for authors of peer-reviewed journal articles to self-archive their work in repositories that are openly accessible. Open access archiving has major advantages over sole reliance on the traditional publishing model. It substantially increases all researchers’ access to the research literature. There is strong evidence that articles that are made openly accessible have substantially more research impact than articles that are available only through subscriptions and licenses....OhioLINK is building the Digital Resource Commons (DRC) for [the] purpose [of self-archiving by Ohio scholars]....

If traditional publication policies are followed, Ohio authors will not retain the rights to disseminate their own works in electronic form....If this continues, the academic community foregoes the ability to maximize access and to control the economic costs of an expanding knowledge base which under the current system is increasingly unaffordable....

1. Faculty are encouraged to publish in journals that have responsible assignment of rights policies. In instances where faculty have a choice among journals, access to scholarship will improve if they choose publishers that, as a matter of practice, have favorable polices towards author self-archiving in open access vehicles. In addition, new journals are emerging that publish according to full open access models.

2. Whether as allowed by a publisher’s standard author agreement or by amendment, authors/copyright holders must retain the NON-EXCUSIVE right to make their work openly accessible and to use it for their own non-commercial educational and research purposes. This can best be accomplished by retaining copyright and only granting the publisher first publication rights. It can also be accomplished within current common practice where copyright transfers to the publisher by the proper retention of self-archiving and use rights....

By altering an author’s agreement with a publisher certain key rights can be secured that will be advantageous for the author, the institution, and potential readers without harming the publisher....[A]n Author’s Addendum to the publisher’s agreement can be used to ensure the author has retained a bundle of key rights. A template to do so from which a final addendum can be created is attached....

We recommend that faculty members, if the copyright owner, and institutions, if the copyright holder, retain author self-archiving and access rights in one form or another. The template illustrates the basic rights that should be retained. Several optional provisions are suggested which the author or institution can elect to incorporate. As noted below, a great number of publishers are receptive to author self-archiving rights and so a basic addendum may suffice in most cases....

3. In parallel with individual author action, OhioLINK will seek to add a clause to its licenses with publishers in its Electronic Journal Center. This clause will seek to automatically provide the recommended self archiving and access rights to all personnel of Ohio higher education institutions.

4. With the retention of rights, we strongly recommend that works in both Published and Unpublished works categories be deposited in the OhioLINK DRC or a campus repository that links to it.

Comments.

1. There are four important things going on here. First, OhioLINK is encouraging Ohio scholars to retain the rights they need for OA archiving. Second, it's providing its own Author Addendum to help authors retain those rights. Third, it's adding its weight as the licensing agent for member institutions to persuade publishers to agree to these terms. (It knows that most publishers already agree and is focusing on the remainder.) And finally, it's encouraging Ohio scholars to self-archive their preprints and postprints in their institutional repository or in OhioLINK's own repository.
2. OhioLINK is a consortium of 85 academic libraries in Ohio representing more than 600,000 faculty, students and staff. It doesn't set campus policies on self-archiving, but it can facilitate them (by creating its own repository, by writing an Author Addendum, by pressuring publishers to drop permission barriers) and it can encourage member institutions to set policy. Here it is doing all that it can. It deserves all our thanks for that.
3. The OhioLINK Author Addendum (pp. 7-8 of the new recommendations) joins those already crafted by SPARC, MIT, and Science Commons.