The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) has released a draft Provosts’ Statement On Publishing Agreements. It includes an author addendum enabling scholars to retain the rights they need to authorize postprint archiving. (Thanks to Eric Mockensturm, who reports that CIC sent the draft to Penn State's Faculty Senate Committee on Research for comment.) Excerpt:
Publication is the lifeblood of a research university. It is incumbent upon faculty, campus administrators and librarians to ensure the free flow of scholarly information in fulfillment of our campus missions to advance the public good through research and education....Suitable publishing partners for academic enterprises should be encouraging the widest possible dissemination of the academy’s work, and the management of copyright should be directed to encouraging scholarly output rather than unnecessarily fettering its access and use. Without some important changes in publishing practices, authors and readers will continue to be frustrated by barriers to the free flow of information that is an essential characteristic of great research universities.
The CIC Provosts...encourage authors to consider publishing strategies that will optimize short and long-term access to their work, taking into account such factors as affordability, efficient means for distribution, a secure third-party archiving strategy, and flexible management of rights....
[T]he CIC Provosts encourage contract language that ensures that academic authors retain certain rights that facilitate archiving, instructional use, and sharing with colleagues to advance discourse and discovery. Accompanying this document is a model CIC publishing addendum that affirms the rights of authors to share their work in a variety of circumstances, including posting versions of the work in institutional or disciplinary repositories....
Comments.
By my count, the CIC author addendum is the eighth, following earlier models (in order) from SPARC, the Boston Library Consortium, MIT, Science Commons, University of North Carolina, OhioLink, and SURF/JISC.
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.
