On Thu, 25 Oct 2007, Warburton, Lisa wrote: > Here at NTU we are trying to sort out our repository policies regarding > submission, metadata etc and we've used the OpenDOAR policy framework as > a starting point. What has caused considerable debate is the statement > found in the Data Policy "This repository is not the publisher; it is > merely the online archive." Are we the only ones who've struggled with > this? The EPrints FAQs > (http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10635/01/index.html#self-archiving-vs-publication) on self-archiving quite strongly says that self deposit is > not publishing, but s175 of CDPA says, if I've interpreted it correctly, > that making copies available to the public by means of an electronic > retrieval system is publishing. Your thoughts, decisions and reasons > for those decisions would be most welcome! The answer is very simple: (1) For academic purposes (CVs, promotion, etc.) putting something on the web is certainly not publishing. You cannot list a paper that has merely been put on the web under "Published Articles." (2) An article that has already been published has already been published. Hence putting it on the web is not publishing it, not even re-publishing it, but merely providing access to it -- just as putting it up on your bulletin board would be. (3) For the purposes of asserting copyright to a work, however, putting it on a piece of paper, a bulletin board, or the web is enough in order to assert copyright. (This is especially useful for asserting copyright as well as primacy for the text.) This too is called "publishing" in a legal sense (but it still does not mean you can call an unpublished preprint that you have put on the web a "publication" on your CV). (4) For published postprints, the optimal policy, the one that moots all legal worries of the kind Lisa probably has in mind, is this: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html (4a) Deposit *all* published postprints, regardless of copyright agreement or publisher policy, in your Institutional Repository (IR). (4b) For those of the postprints published in the 62% of journals that are Green on immediate Open Access Self-Archiving by their authors, set access to all of those deposits as Open Access. http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php (4b) For the remaining 38%, set access as Closed Access (and let the IR's "Email Eprint Request" Button tide over any would-be user needs during any embargo period). http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/ UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal http://romeo.eprints.org/ OR BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.doaj.org/ AND in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article in your own institutional repository. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://archives.eprints.org/ http://openaccess.eprints.org/