On Sat, 31 Jul 2004, Peter Suber wrote: > U.K. House of Commons Committee Report > > 4. SPARC Europe News > > David Prosser, director of SPARC Europe, has provided the following > analysis of the U.K. House of Commons Science and Technology Committee > Report on Scientific Publications and its impact on SPARC Europe. > > 1.Funding bodies should require that authors retain copyright > 2.Funding bodies should require that authors deposit a copy of their > final papers in suitable repositories
There is an error here: The requirement to self-archive (2) is actually recommended, whereas the requirement to retain copyright (1) is only mentioned conditionally: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39909.htm#a31 "117. ...Academic authors currently lack sufficient motivation to self-archive in institutional repositories. We recommend that the Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all their articles in their institution's repository within one month of publication or a reasonable period to be agreed following publication, as a condition of their research grant..." "125. As with many of the issues surrounding the publication of STM journal articles, any change to existing copyright provisions could be problematic if it were implemented at a national level only. If UK authors were mandated to retain the copyright on their articles, this could put them at a disadvantage internationally, as some publishers might select in their place non-UK authors who were still willing to assign all rights. If papers were selected for publication on the basis of quality alone, this ought not to occur. Given evidence of current publisher practices, however, we cannot be entirely confident that the copyright status of authors would be ignored when the publisher decided which articles to accept and which to decline. Such issues present difficulties for the reform of the current system. Nonetheless they should not in themselves be allowed to prevent a move towards a more effective system of self-archiving. 126. The issue of copyright is crucial to the success of self-archiving. We recommend that, as part of its strategy for the implementation of institutional repositories, Government ascertain what impact a UK-based policy of author copyright retention would have on UK authors. Providing that it can be established that such a policy would not have a disproportionately negative impact, Research Councils and other Government funders should mandate their funded researchers to retain the copyright on their research articles, licensing it to publishers for the purposes of publication. The Government would also need to be active in raising the issue of copyright at an international level." I think the UK Committee has been extremely wise and well-informed in the decisions it made: It recommended mandating self-archiving but it only recommended ascertaining the impact of a copyright-retention mandate; it did not recommend mandating it at this time. This was, in my view, *exactly* the right position to take. Moreover, with 84% of journals already giving self-archiving their official green light, the copyright-retention question may well become moot: http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php Stevan Harnad UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: [email protected]
