Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, March 01, 2008

More non-OA publishers supporting SURF / JISC principles

Annemarie Beunen, Acceptance of the JISC/SURF Licence to Publish & accompanying Principles by traditional publishers of journals, SURFfoundation report, dated December 2007 but apparently released February 29, 2008. From the February 29 announcement and summary:

Traditional academic publishers are on the move regarding their policies on copyright and allowing the deposit of articles in a publicly accessible repository and thus becoming freely available. This is the result of an inquiry among a group of 47 traditional (non Open Access) publishers by SURFfoundation. The study asked publishers if they support the Principles formulated by SURFfoundation and JISC, regarding publishing an article in a traditional journal. The conclusion is that more and more traditional publishers support some or all of these Principles or are looking into changes in their current policies in line with these Principles.

The Principles are an attempt to clarify and balance the relationship between the rights of authors and publishers, ensuring wider access to scholarly literature and bringing journals into compliance with a growing number of funder requirements. The main characteristics of the Principles are:

  • The author retains copyright of his/her work, while granting the publisher the rights needed to publish the work
  • The author may freely deposit the article in a research repository, with an embargo before public release of maximum six months.

One third of the publishers in the study already have a repository policy which is compatible with these Principles and the same amount of publishers use a licence to publish instead of copyright transfer. ...

Update. Also see Stevan Harnad's comments.

Update. Also see the article in Information World Review, March 12, 2008.