Re: Understanding OA in the Academic Environment: A Guide

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Many thanks to Stevan for drawing our attention to this important 
new guide. Though it has its limitations (reflecting the 
particular nature of Australian copyright law, for instance), 
most of the content is universally applicable, and this document 
could serve as a good tutorial for staff who need to get up to 
date on the OA movement. I have just recommended it for such use 
to AAUP press directors. The Copyright Toolkit at the end offers 
a very useful condensation of a lot of relevant information that 
authors need to know--and itself dramatizes how complex the scene 
has become as authors need to bear in mind what rights they want 
to retain and what rights they want to license to others.

In particular, it points out the importance of being aware of how 
various licenses may conflict with each other, as between funding 
bodies, institutional repositories, and publishers. Speaking just 
for myself, I also applaud its stance on those forms of the 
author's addendum that claim to be valid even if publishers do 
not sign them (see page 109).

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


> >From the OAK Law Project, an OA Guide for Authors written by
>Kylie Pappalardo (with the assistance of Professor Brian
>Fitzgerald, Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Scott Kiel-Chisholm, Jenny
>Georgiades and Anthony Austin):
>
>http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00013935/01/Microsoft_Word_-%3Cu%3EFinal_Draft%3C/u%3E-_website.pdf
>
>"Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide
>for Authors [by Kylie Pappalardo (with the assistance of
>Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Scott
>Kiel-Chisholm, Jenny Georgiades and Anthony Austin)] aims to
>provide practical guidance for academic authors interested in
>making their work more openly accessible to readers and other
>researchers. The guide provides authors with an overview of the
>concept of and rationale for open access to research outputs and
>how they may be involved in its implementation and with what
>effect. In doing so it considers the central role of copyright
>law and publishing agreements in structuring an open access
>framework as well as the increasing involvement of funders and
>academic institutions. The guide also explains different methods
>available to authors for making their outputs openly accessible,
>such as publishing in an open access journal or depositing work
>into an open access repository. Importantly, the guide addresses
>how open access goals can affect an author's relationship with
>their commercial publisher and provides guidance on how to
>negotiate a proper allocation of copyright interests between an
>author and publisher. A Copyright Toolkit is provided to further
>assist authors in managing their copyright."
>
>####