This article is the fourth in a series of six emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project
(Rights Metadata for Open archiving). It describes an analysis of 80 scholarly journal publishers’
copyright agreements with a particular view to their effect on author self-archiving. 90% of
agreements asked for copyright transfer and 69% asked for it prior to refereeing the paper. 75%
asked authors to warrant that their work had not been previously published although only two
explicitly stated that they viewed self-archiving as prior publication. 28.5% of agreements provided
authors with no usage rights over their own paper. Although 42.5% allowed self-archiving in some
format, there was no consensus on the conditions under which self-archiving could take place. The
article concludes that author-publisher copyright agreements should be reconsidered by a working
party representing the needs of both parties.
History
School
Science
Department
Information Science
Pages
225121 bytes
Citation
GADD, E., OPPENHEIM, C. and PROBETS, S., 2003. RoMEO Studies 4: an analysis of Journal Publishers’ Copyright Agreements. Learned Publishing, 16(4), pp. 293-308
Publisher
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers