New Report: Publishers allow more than authors think

["Publishing Research Consortium" <info@publishingresearch.net>]

Publishers' agreements are more liberal than journal authors 
think, but do not allow self-archiving of the published PDF.

The Publishing Research Consortium has published another in its 
series of reports:  Journal Authors' Rights:  perception and 
reality (Summary Paper 5).

Using re-analysis of the recently published ALPSP report 
Scholarly Publishing Practice 3 (which looks at the practice of 
181 publishers, representing 75% of all articles), and a new 
survey of 1163 authors, the report compares what publishers 
actually allow authors to do with the different versions of their 
manuscript, and what they want to do and believe they are 
permitted to do.

For both the submitted and the accepted version of their 
manuscript, the majority of publishers' agreements (as calculated 
by the number of articles they publish) allow authors to provide 
copies to colleagues, to incorporate into their own works, to 
post to a personal or departmental website or to an institutional 
repository, and to use in course packs;  just under 50% also 
permit posting to a subject repository.  However, far fewer 
authors think they can do any of these than are in fact allowed 
to do so.

The published PDF version is the version that authors would 
prefer to use for all the above purposes;  again, publishers' 
agreements exceed authors' expectations for providing copies to 
colleagues, incorporating in subsequent work, and use in course 
packs.  However, the picture is turned on its head when it comes 
to self-archiving;  more than half of authors think that 
publishers allow them to deposit the final PDF, whereas under 10% 
of publishers actually permit this - probably because of serious 
concerns about the long-term impact on subscriptions.

Why do authors have such a poor understanding of publishers' 
agreements? The PRC concludes that publishers need to do much 
more to make sure that their terms are crystal clear, but also 
suggests that the ambiguous term 'preprint' may mislead authors, 
and should be dropped in favour of the recommended NISO 
terminology.

*Full report:  Sally Morris, Journal Authors' Rights: 
perception and reality (PRC Summary Paper 5), PRC 2009 (PDF) 
http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/JournalAuthorsRights.pdf

*Summary of findings:  Journal Authors' Rights:  perception and 
reality - a preliminary report, PRC 2009 (PPT) 
http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/SummaryforAPE-final.ppt

*Author survey summary:  Author Rights Copyright Project, GfK 
Business 2008 (PPT) 
http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/PRC2008v2.ppt

*John & Laura Cox, Publishing Practice 3, ALPSP 2008 
(PDF) http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?id=200

*Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the 
NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group, NISO l 2008 (PDF) 
http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/RP-8-2008.pdf

The Publishing Research Consortium 
(<http://www.publishingresearch.net/> is a group of associations 
and publishers, which supports global research into scholarly 
communication in order to enable evidence-based discussion.  Our 
objective is to support work that is scientific and 
pro-scholarship. Overall, we aim to promote an understanding of 
the role of publishing and its impact on research and teaching.

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