Publisher best practices for self-archiving authors

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

My series, "Publisher best practices for self-archiving authors", at
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2005/08/publisher-best-practices-
for-self.html, may be of interest in relation to two recent threads:

Discussion of Elsevier's policy (which has merit, but IMHO, is not
considered a best practice at this point).

Attracting authors:  with institutional and disciplinary repositories
becoming more important and visible, more and more authors will be seeking
the best terms of conditions.  Briefly, these are:  author retains as many
rights as possible; immediate self-archiving of the final, peer-reviewed
version in the repository of the author's choice; and clear,
self-archiving policies, particularly ones that encourage author
self-archiving.

As an example, a publisher might prominently publish a notice on their web
site, saying, we here at "journal x" - fully support the desires of your
research funders (NIH, Wellcome Trust, Canada's SSHRC, etc., etc.), as
well as your university administrators, to enhance the impact of the
research they support, through open access.  Click here for our
author-friendly self-archiving policy.

So far, BioMedCentral definitely has the best policies.  Not only are they
fully gold, they are the best example to date of green.  BMC will even
work with institutional repositories to automatically deposit articles,
with the cooperation of the IR, of course.

Publishers looking to revise their authors' agreements will find some good
examples here.

hope this helps,

Heather Morrison