Re: copyright protection paper

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

There's something odd about the findings that have been described in
recent messages, in that publishers -- at least US publishers are all
perfectly aware of the Copyright Act's Secion 105 (government works on
government time, etc.) and do have appropriate forms for these works.  I
am sure that compliance is around 100%.  Perhaps neither study (Romeo or
Cox)  specifically intended to cover that kind of situation.

Furthermore, the reported percentage of publishers permitting posting of
an author's work on the web and/or other rights, seems to me lower than
real-life experience suggests.  Most publishers will - often unasked but
sometimes one needs to ask -- permit posting to web sites and also broad
re-use by the author in various ways.  Authors probably do not not have
all the rights we would ideally like, but the progress/change in the right
direction has been truly significant over the past 5-10 years.

As to Sally Morris's question below, it is the right one.  When publishers
accept articles, they add value and readers, whether of government-funded
or private works, are paying for that value-added.  Thus, just because an
article is freely available, doesn't necessarily mean it is or will be
available for free.  Increasingly, readers (libraries) will be affirming
that the value added is high, when they choose to pay to subscribe to a
journal.

Ann Okerson/Yale Library
ann.okerson@yale.edu

On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Sally Morris wrote:

> What interests me is what difference, if any, the public domain status of
> such works has actually made to their accessibility.  I wonder whether
> anyone is studying this?
> 
> Sally Morris, Secretary-General
> Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
> South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
> 
> Phone:  01903 871686 Fax:  01903 871457 E-mail:  sec-gen@alpsp.org
> ALPSP Website  http://www.alpsp.org
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Lizzie Gadd" <E.A.Gadd@lboro.ac.uk>
> To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
> Sent: Monday, September 01, 2003 3:08 PM
> Subject: Re: copyright protection paper
> 
> 
> > 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
> > Pilkington Library, Loughborough University,
> > e.a.gadd@lboro.ac.uk
>