RoMEO Studies 2: How Academics Want to Protect their Open-Access Research Papers

Abstract

This paper is the second in a series of studies (see E. Gadd, C. Oppenheim and S. Probets. RoMEO studies 1: the impact of copyright ownership on author-self-archiving, Journal of Documentation 59(3) (2003) 243-277) emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers the protection for research papers afforded by UK copyright law, and by e-journal licences. It compares this with the protection required by academic authors for open-access research papers as discovered by the RoMEO academic author survey. The survey used the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) as a framework for collecting views from 542 academics as to the permissions, restrictions and conditions they wanted to assert over their works. Responses from self-archivers and non-archivers are compared. The paper concludes that most academic authors are primarily interested in preserving their moral rights, and that the protection offered research papers by copyright law is way in excess of that required by most academics. It also raises concerns about the level of protection enforced by e-journal licence agreements.

Keywords

Scholarly publications authors self-archiving electronic publishing copyright open archives initiative

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

[1] The Copyright Licensing Agency; www.cla.co.uk(2003).

[2] A. Okerson , Copyright or contract? , Library Journal 122(14) (2003) 136-139 .

[3] L. Kaye , Owning and licensing content - key legal issues in the electronic environment , Journal of Information Science 25(1) (1999) 7-14 .

[4] R. Richards , Licensing agreements: contracts, the eclipse of copyright, and the promise of cooperation , The Acquisitions Librarian 89(26) (2001).

[5] Anonymous , The scholarly communications crisis , presented at The Scholarly Communication Crisis - Change the Future!, Worcester College, Oxford (8 March 2002). Available at: www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ulsd/curl/advocacy.doc

[6] S.D. McGinnis , Selling our collecting souls: how licence agreements are controlling collection management , Journal of Library Administration 31(2) (2000) 63-76 .

[7] ArXiv.org eprint archive (2003); http://arxiv.org/

[8] R. Crow , The Case for Institutional Repositories: a SPARC Position Paper ( The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Washington, DC , 2002). Available at: www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html

[9] S. Harnad, For Whom the Gate Tolls? How and Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving, Now (2001). Available at: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/39/index.html

10.

[10] B. Cope and R. Freeman (eds), Digital Rights Management and Content Development. ( Common Ground, Altona, Vic. , 2000).

11.

[11] P. Johnson , All wrapped up? A review of the enforceability of `shrink-wrap' and `click-wrap' licences in the United Kingdom and the United States , European Intellectual Property Review 25(2) (2003) 98-102 .

12.

[12] Anonymous , What is Copyleft? ( Free Software Foundation Inc. , 2002). Available at: www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html

13.

[13] Creative Commons (2003); http://creativecommons.org

14.

[14] RoMEO Project (2003); www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html

15.

[15] E. Gadd , C. Oppenheim and S. Probets , RoMEO Studies 3: how academics expect to use open-access research papers , Journal of Library and Information Science 35(3) (in press).

16.

[16] Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 ( HMSO, London , 1988).

17.

[17] Open Digital Rights Language (2002); http://odrl.net/

18.

[18] L. Lessig , Free culture . Keynote paper presented at the Open Source Convention (22-26 July, 2002, San Diego, CA). Available at: www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/08/15/lessig.html

19.

[19] Council Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the Harmonization of Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society. Available at: www.patent.gov.uk/about/consultations/eccopyright/annexb.htm

20.

[20] C. Clark , Photo-copying: Photocopying from Books and Journals: a Guide for all Users of Copyright Literary Works ( British Copyright Council, London , 1990), p.10.

21.

[21] Fair Dealing and Library Privilege: Copyright for Research and Private Study in the UK (Copyright Licensing Agency, London, 2000). Available at: www.cla.co.uk/copyrightvillage/fairdealing.PDF

22.

[22] UUK vs CLA (2001), CT71/00, 72/00, 73/00, 74/00 and 75/00. Available at: www.patent.gov.uk/copy/tribunal/uukvcla.pdf

23.

[23] Guidelines for Fair Dealing in an Electronic Environment (Joint Information Systems Committee, Publishers Association, London, 1998). Available at: www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/papers/pa/fair/intro.html

24.

[24] Council Directive 92/100/EEC of 19 November 1992 on rental right and lending right and on certain rights related to copyright in the field of intellectual property. Available at: http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ecommerce/legal/documents/392L0100/392L0100_EN.doc

25.

[25] Council Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the Harmonization of Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society. Available at: www.patent.gov.uk/about/consultations/eccopyright/annexb.htm

26.

[26] United States Code. 17 USC 109. Available at: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/index.html

27.

[27] The Copyright and Related Rights Regulations , SI 1996/2967. Reg. 10(2) (1996).

28.

29.

[29] Summary table of electronic journal licences, Leicester University (2003). Available at: www.le.ac.uk/li/sources/ejournal/licences.html

30.

[30] Permitted uses of online resources, Yale University Library (2003). Available at: www.library.yale.edu/journals/licensing.html

31.

[31] Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code (Library of Congress, US Copyright Office, Washington, DC, 2001), s. 107. Available at: www.copyright.gov/title17/circ92.pdf

32.

[32] E. Gadd , C. Oppenheim and S. Probets , RoMEO studies 1: the impact of copyright ownership on academic author self-archiving , Journal of Documentation 59(3) (2003) 243-277 .

33.

[33] E. Gadd , C. Oppenheim and S. Probets , RoMEO studies 6: rights metadata for open archiving, Program (submitted).

34.

[34] A. Swan , Authors and Electronic Publishing: the ALPSP Research Study on Authors' and Readers' Views of Electronic Research Communication ( ALPSP, West Sussex , 2002), 83pp.

35.

[35] H. Woodward , C. McKnight , C. Pritchett and F. Rowland , Cafe Jus: Commercial and Free Electronic Journals User Study, Research and Innovation Report ( British Library, London , 1997), pp. 1-52.

36.

[36] C. Tenopir and D.W. King , Reading behaviour and electronic journals , Learned Publishing 15(4) (2002) 259-265 .