Nature, outpacing even the highly progressive American Physical Society
(APS), has once again led the planet's 20,000 peer-reviewed journals in
introducing the optimal and inevitable copyright policy for the online
era: http://makeashorterlink.com/?I31721703 (Many thanks to APS's Mark
Doyle for pointing this out!)
"From 14 February 2002 Nature Publishing Group no longer requires
authors to sign away their copyright. Instead, we are asking for an
exclusive licence. In return, authors will be free to reuse their
papers in any of their future printed work, and have the right to
post a copy of the published paper on their own websites.
In addition, authors - and the institutions in which they work -
will be free to use their papers in course packs."
Sample license form: http://npg.nature.com/pdf/05_news.pdf
It is now time for the other 20,000 journals to follow suit (and
-- attention Liz Gadd! time for ROMEO to update its records:
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html
or
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
Discussion can be posted to: [log in to unmask]
See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative:
http://www.soros.org/openaccess
the Free Online Scholarship Movement:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
the SPARC position paper on institutional repositories:
http://www.unites.uqam.ca/src/sante.htm
the OAI site:
http://www.openarchives.org
and the free OAI institutional archiving software site:
http://www.eprints.org/
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