Partnering on Copyright

Overview

Providing open access to the scholarly journal literature is now high on government agendas across Europe and the rest of the world. One of the key sticking points has always been the transferral of copyright in those journal articles firstly from the HEI to their academic authors, and secondly from the academic author to the publisher. In the UK, the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee’s recent report on scientific publications recommended “that higher education institutions are funded to enable them to assume control of copyright arising from their research”. The UK Government, in its response, has argued that this issue, together with most of the other recommendations made by the Select Committee, should be left to Universities themselves.

Under current conditions, providing open access to the journal literature will depend on academics selecting journals with repository-friendly copyright policies that allow them to make their scholarly journal articles available on institutional repositories. Publisher copyright policies are documented in their Copyright Transfer Agreements (CTAs) or Licences that are signed by academic authors. To promote the progress of open access, the JISC-funded RoMEO Project compiled a listing of over 70 worldwide journal publishers’ CTAs and whether they allowed the archiving of the pre-print, the post-print or both. The listing was heavily used by academics both wishing to archive historic literature, and to select archiving-friendly publishers for future publications. At the end of the RoMEO project, SHERPA took over the maintenance of the SHERPA/RoMEO database and improved its functionality by adding a publisher search interface. The listing continues to be heavily used, both by authors themselves and by those archiving on their behalf, e.g., centralised University services offering to deposit material for academics.

Other developments have also taken place in this area. Southampton University have taken the RoMEO data and created the 'Self-Archiving By Journal' site, which allows CTAs to be searched by journal title. The DARE CoMa project has independently made recommendations for a database providing information about publishers’ copyright terms, and for a facility by which publishers may be contacted by academics wishing to request permission to archive. .

The time has come for the original SHERPA/RoMEO database to be developed to evaluate, incorporate and where desirable extend to include all these innovations. This would make it an even more versatile and usable tool for academics and repository administrators looking for a simple way to evaluate any potential copyright barriers to archiving existing and future works.

Aims & Objectives

The Copyright Knowledge Bank project has four main aims:

• To improve the coverage of the SHERPA/RoMEO database

The Knowledge Bank is incorporating publisher CTA policies for more than 120 leading journal publishers in the world. The journal publishers currently represented are a combination of those from the RoMEO database and those added by the SHERPA project. Other publishers continue to be recommended to the project by the SHERPA facility for community involvement and feedback, which also accommodates suggestions based on revised publisher CTAs.

• To develop the functionality of the SHERPA/RoMEO database

The functionality of the Knowledge Bank is being developed in consultation with Tilburg University’s CoMa project, and will be searchable by publisher name and by journal title. The existing SHERPA/RoMEO SQL database is a major component in the architecture, but is being significantly extended to ensure that a reliable and manageable mapping from journal to publisher can be made. This will also provide for the automatic generation of a letter or email to be sent to a particular publisher requesting permission to place the article on the repository.

Tilburg will contribute details of the structure of the CoMa database and its content, and will work in close collaboration with the UK partners to ensure the proposed CoMA development work, outlined in the separate document, integrates with the work outlined here.

• To make the raw CTA data available to and usable by others

Although the public interface is to provide a good level of service to academics wishing to discover the copyright practices of journals and publishers, it is believed that making the raw data available to other service providers is also beneficial. Therefore, the publisher-specific data (i.e., data describing the copyright policies on a per-publisher level) is also being made publicly available. In order to do this, an XML schema and associated controlled vocabulary is being developed to enable the common aspects of copyright policies to be systematically described.

In order to accomplish this task, common archiving terms, conditions and restrictions are being determined and the most appropriate mechanism for representing these in a machine-readable way are being derived. A controlled vocabulary with standard definitions is being developed to facilitate this process. This will result in a facility where the basic archiving agreements contained within publisher’s CTAs may be downloaded by administrators of 3rd party services who require knowledge of the content of publisher’s CTAs.

• To make recommendations on the long-term maintenance of the database

It cannot be stressed too strongly that the proposed Knowledge Bank needs to be maintained after the end of this project, in February 2006. We will investigate organisations that may be willing to take on The long-term housing and maintenance of the Knowledge Bank and probable costings will be investigated and recommendations made on how to maintain the service in the future.

Project Outputs

The key project output is a freely accessible, easy-to-use, multi-functional Copyright Knowledge Bank with a related CTA terms taxonomy, both of which may be re-used by other groups. Miirror sites for the Knowledge Bank are being investigated. A final report documenting the experiences and outcomes of this project is also to be produced.

Tilburg University is also developing an automatic letter generator, details of which are in a separate document.

Project Outcomes

It is envisaged that the Copyright Knowledge Bank will have a significant impact on the HEI and the publishing community in the UK, the Netherlands and beyond. Academic authors should be able to easily discover whether they may archive existing journal articles, and where they should target future papers if they wish to archive. This will help HEIs wishing to establish IRs. The Knowledge Bank should stimulate further discussion and debate about the author-publisher bargain, whilst also assisting publishers that may wish to redevelop their CTAs by showing how their approach compares to other organisations.

Project Partners

Project Management

Project Coordination:

Project undertaken by: Prof. Charles Oppenheim (Loughborough University), Dr. Steve Probets (Loughborough University), Celia Jenkins (Loughborough University), Bill Hubbard (SHERPA, University of Nottingham), Mike Gardner (University of Nottingham), Thomas Place (Tilburg University) & Vanessa Proudman (Tilburg University).