Understanding and Making Use of Academic Authors’ Open…

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Understanding and Making Use of Academic Authors’ Open Access Rights :

INTRODUCTION : Authors of academic works do not take full advantage of the self-archiving rights that they retain in their publications, though research shows that many academic authors are well-aligned (at least in principle) with open access (OA) principles. This article explains how institutionally-assisted self-archiving in open access repositories can effectively take advantage of retained rights and highlights at least one method of facilitating this process through automated means.

METHODS : To understand the scope of author-retained rights (including the right to purchase hybrid or other open access options) at some sample universities, author-rights data through the SHERPA/RoMEO API was combined with individual article citations (from Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science) for works published over a one-year period (2011) and authored by individuals affiliated with five major U.S. research universities.

RESULTS : Authors retain significant rights in the articles that they create. Of the 29,322 unique articles authored over the one year period at the five universities, 28.83 percent could be archived in final PDF form and 87.95 percent could be archived as the post-print version. Nearly 43.47 percent also provided authors the choice of purchasing a hybrid paid open access option.

DISCUSSION : A significant percentage of current published output could be archived with little or no author intervention. With prior approval through an open access policy or otherwise, article manuscripts or final PDFs can be obtained and archived by library staff, and hybrid paid-OA options could be negotiated and exploited by library administrators.

CONCLUSION : Although mandates, legislation, and other policy tools may be useful to promote open access, many institutions already have the ability to increase the percentage of accessible works by taking advantage of retained author rights and hybrid OA options.”

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss2/6/

Back to the future: authors, publishers and ideas in a copy-friendly environment

How could scholars survive in a copy-friendly environment jeopardizing the established system of scholarly publishing in which scientific publishers seemed to be authors’ best friends? A backward itinerary across three German Enlightenment thinkers who took part to the debate on (unauthorized) reprinting shows us ways – usual and unusual – in which culture can flourish in a copy-friendly environment.

While Fichte endorsed an intellectual property theory, took the function of publishers for granted and neglected the interests of the public, Kant saw authors as speakers and justified publishers’ rights only as long as they work as spokespersons helping writers to reach the public. Eventually Lessing’s project was designed to foster authors’ autonomy by means of a subscription system that could have worked only on the basis of a free information flow and of direct relationships with and within the public itself.

Such a condition can be compared with the situation of ancient auctores, with one difference: while the ancient communities of knowledge were educated minorities, because of the limitations of orality and manuscript media system, we have now the opportunity to take Enlightenment seriously.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15445