The recent vote by MIT faculty to freely and publicly distribute research articles they write marks a sea change in the relationship between academic authors and publishers of scientific journals.
“Resistance by publishers to authors retaining copyright and posting their scholarship online is diminishing,” says Brent Roe, executive director of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. “Work by professor Stevan Harnad at Montreal’s Université du Québec and others indicate that a majority of journals now allow authors to engage in internet self-archiving on an institutional repository or some other form of open distribution of their work.” ...
“Until now, authors — usually with support of their libraries — have had to approach journals individually about accepting the addendum,” says Jennifer McLennan, SPARC communications director. “Now, as institutions adopt campus-wide open-access policies, authors have the weight of a MIT, Harvard or Stanford behind them. The climate has changed totally.”
But individual scholars still have a prominent role to play, she added, citing the case of Chris Boulton, a PhD student in communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Last year Boulton submitted an article with the addendum attached to The Communication Review, a Taylor & Francis journal. His article was accepted for publication, but the addendum was rejected. The journal’s publisher asked Bolton to give up the copyright to his article, but he refused and in turn rallied the other contributors in the journal edition behind the demand, delaying the release of the publication. After three months of negotiations, Taylor & Francis reversed their policy and agreed to accept the SPARC addendum.
“The first response was no, and this could easily dissuade a vulnerable academic trying to establish a publication record,” says Boulton. “But we pushed back. If publishers are flooded with the addendum and more authors refuse to blink, we will force changes.” ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 6/10/2009 12:29:00 AM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
