Scholars are often exhorted to retain the copyright rights to their journal articles to ensure that they can freely use their own work and to permit others to freely read and use it as well. The question for scholars who are convinced to do so is: "How do I do that?"
The first thing to understand is that copyright is not one right. Rather, it is a bundle of rights that can be individually granted or withheld. The second thing to understand is that rights can either be granted exclusively to one party or nonexclusively to multiple parties....
Comment. This is a good introduction to the options. I'd only make two additions.
Authors needn't retain full copyright in order to provide OA to their own work. They only need to retain the right of OA archiving --which, BTW, about 70% of journals already give to authors in the copyright transfer agreement.
Charles mentions the author addenda from SPARC and Science Commons, but there's also one from MIT.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/04/2006 08:48:00 AM.
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.
