Open Access News

Advancing the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge is the nominally shared philosophy of all the stakeholders in scholarly communication systems, publishers included. Indeed it is the stated life’s work or mission of some, especially of scholarly societies. But increasing shareholder value, or, for many societies, supporting all of their good works on the backs of publishing revenues, too often trumps the philosophy. So the question becomes this: Through what logic and what mechanisms, if any, can copyright be managed to truly support that underlying philosophy?...

The need for global balance between monetary incentives to publish and the ensuing societal benefits is not much on the minds of scholars when they consider the terms of a publication agreement. But when scholars are, in fact, tempted to consider managing their copyright, what prompts them is the rationale that “retaining copyright can increase the amount of and the forms of dissemination of my scholarship, which leads to its greater use, impact, and resulting rewards.”

Libraries should be clear and honest about the logic of our advocacy, too, which seems to be: Faculty copyright retention is a necessary precondition for developing new forms of dissemination that (possibly) allow restructuring of some of the economic patterns to be more sustainable. Or, more bluntly, copyright retention and subsequent grants of use (might) reduce/remove (some) economic barriers to acquiring content for research/teaching....

The tool currently at the heart of scholars’ copyright management is the publication agreement/contract they sign with the publisher. It makes sense to encourage and guide authors to amend or replace the copyright language in those contracts or, perhaps even more effectively, to replace the entire contract with one designed around clear rights statements. Through their licenses, the Creative Commons has given us mechanisms to declare and attach rights to material. SPARC and the Science Commons are now extending that work by providing a model publishing contract addendum that leverages the directness and simplicity of the Creative Commons terms.  But it’s a tough slog to get these addenda and alternative publication agreements used. One response is to surround the model addenda with other copyright management infrastructure. Components of that infrastructure include, at the minimum:  [1] Extending our understanding of current faculty attitudes and behavior toward copyright; [2] A proactive campaign to educate and reach out to scholars, particularly one focused on their own self-interest in copyright management; and [3] Crucially, an explicit place to exercise the retained rights and provide unfettered access to scholarship, i.e., an institutional repository (IR) (or, failing that, assistance in depositing work in disciplinary repositories, such as PubMed Central, arXiv, CogPrints, and the like).