These days it is easy to put things on line....The problem is not technical, its legal — every time you publish an article you sign an “author’s agreement” with a journal. If you are like me, you probably never read those agreements in detail and probably couldn’t understand the legalese even if you did. As a result a lot of us don’t feel comfortable putting PDFs of our articles on the web for anyone to access because we are afraid that we are violating our author’s agreements when we do so. Is there some way to avoid this problem? The answer, luckily, is yes.
One solution, he says, is an author’s addendum — a little bit of legalese that you add to the agreement with your publisher and sign that lets you save the rights you need in order to make your work open access.
Luckily, you do not have to write these addenda yourself — several organizations have already created legal boilerplate that you can use....
Now, some would say: Will my publisher ever allow me to use these addenda? The answer, surprisingly, is yes. Publishers often want your copyright so that they will not have legal problems everytime they want to add their collection to JSTOR or include their pieces in a reader or whatnot. An addendum that allows everyone — including them — access to your piece makes this easier for them. The other big concern of publishers is that you are going to put the same article in one of their competitor’s journals which of course is not the point of these addenda. On the whole, publishers are quite flexible if you let them know you are just going to include a copy of your article on your own website or on your institution’s website....
Comment. All true and useful. Just remember that all OA journals and about 70% of non-OA journals already allow authors to self-archive their peer-reviewed postprints. At those journals, no negotiation or author's addendum is needed.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/03/2006 01:26:00 PM.
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.
