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Re: Author's Rights: Going Too Far - Or Industry Standard?



If peer-reviewed papers are allowed to be posted on IRs and personal web sites, how is this not open access? My understanding is that this is what Stevan Harnad calls Green OA.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

Is Author's Rights going too far, as a couple of recent commenters have suggested - or, are liberal author's rights rapidly becoming an industry standard?

The recent statement on the topic by the STM / PSP / ALPSP groups suggests the latter, that the emerging standard in the industry is liberal copyright which leaves most rights with the author.

From the Statement:

Standard journal agreements typically allow authors:

* To use their published paper in their own teaching and generally within their institution for educational purposes * To send copies to their research colleagues * To re-use portions of their paper in further works or book chapters, and * To post some version of the paper on a pre-print server, their Institutional Repository or a personal web site (though sometimes not for the weekly news-oriented science or medical magazines, for public health and similar reasons)

It is also noteworthy that the language refers to grants of copyright or publishing agreements, an accurate reflection of this moment in the transition to open access, when many, but not all, publishers have moved to a "license to publish" and away from the older and unnecessary copyright transfer agreement.

This is not open access, but definitely a step in the right direction! (Even if the sentence starting though sometimes not...is just a little obscure).

The STM/PSP/ALPSP position statement was recently posted to Liblicense, at:http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0803/msg00035.html

Any opinion expressed in this e-mail is that of the author alone,and
does not represent the opinion or policy of BC Electronic Library
Network or Simon Fraser University Library.

Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com