Re: copyright protection paper

["Lizzie Gadd" <E.A.Gadd@lboro.ac.uk>]

Having just performed an analysis of 80 journal publishers' copyright
transfer agreements and licences as part of the RoMEO project, I was
surprised at the ALPSP survey findings wrt the number of publishers
allowing self-archiving.  According to our current list of publisher
self-archiving policies at
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm
just 42.5% of publishers allow self-archiving of any kind.  That breaks
down into 25% allowing self-archiving of both pre and post-print, 8.7%
allowing pre-print only, and 8.7% allowing post-print only.  We found that
some publishers' general policy statements said they allowed
self-archiving, whilst their actual copyright agreements said that they
did not.  I wonder whether this is what we are seeing in the ALPSP
findings?

With regard to US Govt-owned works, we found that 57.5% of agreements
recognised that manuscripts may belong in this category by virtue of a
specific clause.  This illustrates that many publishers are willing/able
to live with a parallel publication system where a work is both in the
public domain and published in a peer-reviewed vehicle.  The full-text of
an article (soon to appear in Learned Publishing) based on our analysis is
available on the Project RoMEO web pages at:
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/RoMEO%20Studies%204.pdf

Best
Elizabeth Gadd

**********************************************************
Elizabeth Gadd, Academic Librarian (Engineering)
Editor, Library and Information Research
Pilkington Library, Loughborough University,
Loughborough, LE11 3TU
Tel +44 (0)1509 222344
Fax +44 (0)1509 223993
e.a.gadd@lboro.ac.uk
*********************************************************