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Researchers are confused about what they have signed away in copyright and therefore, as a fail-safe precaution, they often elect not to self-archive. At the same time the legal office of the university worries about whether it is opening itself to litigation by allowing self-archiving. Both fears are mostly groundless, but it is difficult to convince the participants otherwise. They simply do not understand the policies of publishers (nor generally want to), and the self-archiving copyright of scholarly articles are often (wrongly) conflated with music, video and other general public piracy issues. Scholarly articles are given away for free by authors, which is not generally true of music and video.
The policies of all the major publishers are recorded in Sherpa. If any publishers in your country are not covered, they should be encouraged to provide the necessary information. For example, the Australian Computer Society Inc (Journal of Research & Practice in Information Technology and others) is listed. If you prefer to look at the policies by journal, this is available too at Romeo, covering 8600+ journals. It is a simple matter for anyone with online access to check the policy for any journal or publisher. Over 90% of journals permit the self-archiving of articles on an institutional repository. Note for emphasis: over 90% of journals.
The OAK Law Project, who are funded by DEST to develop “Legal Protocols for Copyright Management: Facilitating Open Access to Research at the National and International Levels” have undertaken to extend the SHERPA list to include publishers of interest to Australian authors who wish to self-archive their work and the Australian repository managers who are working in the copyright minefield.
The OAK team are currently gathering publication agreements which will be interpreted by a copyright lawyer to determine the level of open access permitted by the exisiting policy. The information will be integrated into the SHERPA list but there will also be a local list developed (perhaps called the OAK List) that will include all the information in a machine-readable format.
All repository managers can participate by supplying copies of publication agreements for interpretation or by just suggesting publishers that should be contacted. This wiki could be used to list the publishers “in process” and the list of publishers who have been suggested to OAK. This would avoid duplication of effort. We could even use the wiki as an interim source of information about the policies that have been checked while we wait for the new “List” to be built.
It remains a difficult task to educate researchers regarding these facts a priori, though already self-archiving authors seem to have little trouble. Simply put, researchers don’t want to be copyright lawyers.
A simple solution is being implemented at QUT: the author self-archives the article; the moderator from the Library checks the journal permissions and if allowed makes the article open-access. If not, it remains archived, the metadata is open to the Internet, but the full-text is restricted to authorized users only (ie the librarians) without special permission. The author is pleased that his or her legal liability is being looked after, the university legal office is delighted to delegate such a high-volume set of queries, and everyone is happy. The cost: the Library has to expend a little more effort to check copyright issues – but not much.