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Re: renegotiating licenses

Hallo Matthew

I am also extremely interested in this project. At the University 
of Pretoria (South Africa), our openUP office has undertaken a 
project to manage copyright/licences with (mostly) South African 
publishers. Very few South African journals' archiving policies 
can be found on the SHERPA/RoMEO database and we have 
successfully negotiated the archiving of the published PDF 
version with many of these publishers on behalf of the authors.

We do not pay anything for the right to archive the published PDF 
version, although some publishers impose an embargo period (which 
is adhered to strictly). The feedback was as follows: 47% of the 
South African publishers contacted prefer the archiving of the 
published PDF version; 44% of the publishers have either not 
replied or formulated a general policy on Open access and 
archiving yet; 3% prohibits archiving and will not allow any form 
of archiving; 4% of the publishers will allow the archiving of 
the pre- or post-print version; 1% of the publishers will allow 
the archiving of the post-print (post-refereed) version; and 1% 
will allow archiving of the pre-print (pre-refereed) version. 
This is an ongoing project and I hope to negotiate with more 
publishers in future.

In answer to Joe Esposito's questions: we are subscribed to most 
of these journals (although not all), and our aim is opening 
access to the University of Pretoria research towards the 
advancement of science. We believe that we have an important role 
to play in making the smaller societal publishers aware of the 
Open access movement and the development of institutional 
repositories. Most publishers are very supportive and we have 
developed new cooperation strategies - even forward the latest 
issue of the journal or the articles to me the moment the new 
issue is published. The archiving conditions of the publishers 
are kept on a spreadsheet, is updated by the openUP office and 
used by our submitters on a daily basis. If you want to know more 
about this project, please contact me or read and view the 
abstract and poster which was presented at the ELPUB 2008 
conference, presented in Toronto, Canada in June: 
http://hdl.handle.net/2263/6042

****