Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India - Centre for Internet and ...

Chapter 5: Publisher Self-archiving Policies and Author
Addenda
Self-archiving Policies
In the early years of the open access movement, there was a perception among some
sections of the open access advocates that publishers were the villains stalling the advance
of open access. And what some publishers and their association did — such as hiring
a ‘pit bull’ public relations consultant who advised them to spread falsehood about
the open access movement,128 and investing a huge sum of money to lobby a US senator
who sponsored two amendments 129 to delete or weaken the NIH Open Access Mandate
130 in the FY 2008 Labour, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations
Bill 131 — did not help change the perception. But eventually, publishers realized
that their best strategy would be to coexist with open access. They mellowed enough to
share with authors some of the exploitation rights under the copyright agreement and allow
authors to self-archive their papers in their institution's repository with some conditions.
Today close to 91 per cent of journals allow some form of self-archiving rights to
authors. We present in Appendix 4 the self-archiving policies of a few major publishers.
As long as the repositories are OAI compliant, distributed documents can be treated
as if they were all in one place and one format and a search using a standard search engine
will pick up relevant papers from all such repositories.
Copyright Addenda
Journal publishers send authors of accepted papers a copyright agreement form along
with the proofs. Often the language used in these forms demand the authors to give away
copyright of the papers to the publishers. Most authors sign on the dotted line and surrender
all the rights.
In the past few years, authors are becoming aware of the benefits of retaining certain
rights, such as right to reproduce figures, tables, etc., in future writings (review articles,
monographs), right to reproduce multiple copies for use in a course they teach, and the
right to archive the paper in their institution's repository. What is more, most publishers
are ready to grant these rights if only authors request for them.
128
Gilles J (2007), PR's 'pit bull' takes on Open Access, Nature, 445:347; doi:10.1038/445347a.
129 http://www.digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans2007/10/21/text-of-the-inhofe-amendments-that-affectthe-nih-open-access-mandate/
130 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-07.htm#nih.
131 Opensecrets.org lists Reed Elsevier as one of sen. Inhofe's top contributors, (2007), DigitalKoans;
http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2007/10/24/opensecretsorg-lists-reed-elsevier-as-one-of-seninhofes-top-contributors/.
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