Science Commons has launched a major new project called Scholar's Copyright. It consists of three short amendments or Author Addenda that researchers may attach to their copyright transfer agreements with publishers. The addenda let authors retain the rights they need for OA. Like Creative Commons licenses, each of these will come in lawyer-readable, layperson-readable, and machine-readable forms. So far, only the lawyer-readable forms are available.
The OpenAccess-CreativeCommons 1.0 Addendum reserves the right for the author to post the published version (for example, as a .pdf file) immediately and to grant others a Creative Commons "Attribution NonCommercial" license to use the article.
http://sciencecommons.org/literature/scaa-openaccess-creativecommons-1.0.pdf
The OpenAccess-Publish 1.0 Addendum reserves the right for the author to post the published version immediately upon publication.
http://sciencecommons.org/literature/scaa-openaccess-publish-1.0.pdf
The OpenAccess-Delay 1.0 Addendum reserves the right for the author to post the author's final manuscript version immediately and the published version six months after publication.
http://sciencecommons.org/literature/scaa-openaccess-delay-1.0.pdf
For a good discussion of why they're needed, how they differ from previous author addenda, and why we need three rather than just one, the background briefing paper is very helpful. Excerpt:
[T]he full powers of new technological approaches, such as text mining and semantic indexing, are not resulting in powerful new public resources. Contracts between publishers and universities can explicitly forbid such use of technology on scholarly resources, and the opportunities implicit in the Internet fall by the wayside. Efforts to create an "open access" movement have shown real success. But unfortunately the majority of scholarly research is unavailable, either for reading or for processing in software....
[M]ore than 90% of journals allow some form of archiving. In theory then, most authors in most journals can indeed legally self-archive. In practice, whatever the journals may state as a policy, many scientists are deterred by the legal issues, which are not well understood by authors. The Wellcome Trust has commissioned a special effort to examine, clarify and update the existing policy research.
Restrictions against archiving arise from the industry practice of requiring copyright assignments from the authors of scholarly papers to the publishers....These agreements do often allow authors to make archive copies available on the Internet, but with inconsistent policies and terms on timing of release, file formats, and location of archives. Some journals obscure their archiving policies on back pages of websites or don’t publish a policy at all....
The legal friction has not gone unaddressed. SeveralAddenda to copyright transfer agreements and suggested contract language to make compliance rights explicit have come from funders, librarians and universities. These proposals provide a mechanism and tools to negotiate and modify an existing copyright transfer agreement. Other approaches include replacing the copyright alienation systems with non-exclusive grants of a “license to publish” wherein the author retains ownership of the copyright and thus the rights to archive the article. Early anecdotes suggest some success in terms of publisher acceptance of these new approaches, but none of the existing legal tools rises to the level of a standard. This creates, in turn, the risk of exacerbating the level of confusion, inconsistency, and arbitrariness of the present system.
Authors need to have the clear and unambiguous freedom to engage in their normal everyday scholarly activities without contending with complex technology, continuous amendments to contracts, or the need for a lawyer.
Although institution, funder, and policymaker may craft different legal text to reserve archiving rights for different classes of journal policy, these variations reveal clear patterns of use: the key variations are time to release an archived document, the format of the archived document, and the location of the archived document. These patterns can be identified and expressed in standard contract language. With significant community participation, the scientific community can build a new set of shared norms instead of wasting valuable resources through repeated negotiations....
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.
