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This report is welcome for strongly confirming what was already known from the Romeo  directory of publisher self-archiving policies (SHERPA/Nottingham, with an author-oriented rendering at EPrints/Southampton): The majority of journals (over 90%) endorse the immediate, unembargoed author self-archiving of some version of the article (63% for the refereed version).

It is also quite correct that:

(1) Most publishers endorse only the immediate, unembargoed self-archiving of the author's refereed, revised, accepted final draft, not the publisher's proprietary PDF.

(2) Most publishers endorse immediate, unembargoed self-archiving only on the author's institutional website, not on a 3rd-party website, such as a central or subject-based repository.

Both of these limitations are just fine and in no way limit or compromise the provision of (Green, gratis) Open Access. What would-be users worldwide who do not have subscription access to the publisher's proprietary PDF urgently need today is access to the refereed research itself, and that is what depositing it into the author's Institutional repository provides.

Although the word "print" is somewhat misleading in the online era, because most eprints are not printed out at all, but consulted only in their online version, the preprint/postprint distinction is perfectly coherent: a preprint is any draft preceding the author's final, accepted, refereed version, and a postprint is any draft from the author's final, accepted refereed version onward (including the publisher's PDF). Preprint/postprint marks the essential OA distinction: There is no need to use the complicated NISO terminology instead.

The PRC Report is quite right that authors are still greatly under-informed about Open Access, Self-Archiving, and Rights. Universities need to master the essential information and then convey it to their researchers.

See: 
"Too Much Ado About PDF"
"Waking OA's Slumbering Giant: Why Locus-of-Deposit Matters for Open Access and Open Access Mandates"
"What is an Eprint?"

Stevan Harnad

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Publishing Research Consortium <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Publishers’ agreements are more liberal than journal authors think, but do not allow self-archiving of the published PDF

 

The Publishing Research Consortium has published another in its series of reports:  Journal Authors’ Rights:  perception and reality (Summary Paper 5).

 

Using re-analysis of the recently published ALPSP report Scholarly Publishing Practice 3 (which looks at the practice of 181 publishers, representing 75% of all articles), and a new survey of 1163 authors, the report compares what publishers actually allow authors to do with the different versions of their manuscript, and what they want to do and believe they are permitted to do.

 

For both the submitted and the accepted version of their manuscript, the majority of publishers’ agreements (as calculated by the number of articles they publish) allow authors to provide copies to colleagues, to incorporate into their own works, to post to a personal or departmental website or to an institutional repository, and to use in course packs;  just under 50% also permit posting to a subject repository.  However, far fewer authors think they can do any of these than are in fact allowed to do so.

 

The published PDF version is the version that authors would prefer to use for all the above purposes;  again, publishers’ agreements exceed authors’ expectations for providing copies to colleagues, incorporating in subsequent work, and use in course packs.  However, the picture is turned on its head when it comes to self-archiving;  more than half of authors think that publishers allow them to deposit the final PDF, whereas under 10% of publishers actually permit this – probably because of serious concerns about the long-term impact on subscriptions.

 

Why do authors have such a poor understanding of publishers’ agreements?  The PRC concludes that publishers need to do much more to make sure that their terms are crystal clear, but also suggests that the ambiguous term ‘preprint’ may mislead authors, and should be dropped in favour of the recommended NISO terminology.

 

·        Full report:  Sally Morris, Journal Authors’ Rights:  perception and reality (PRC Summary Paper 5), PRC 2009 (PDF)  http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/JournalAuthorsRights.pdf

·        Summary of findings:  Journal Authors’ Rights:  perception and reality – a preliminary report, PRC 2009 (PPT) http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/SummaryforAPE-final.ppt

·        Author survey summary:  Author Rights Copyright Project, GfK Business 2008 (PPT) http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/PRC2008v2.ppt

·        John & Laura Cox, Publishing Practice 3, ALPSP 2008 (PDF) http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?id=200&did=47&aid=24781&st=&oaid=-1

·        Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group, NISO l 2008 (PDF)   http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/RP-8-2008.pdf

 

The Publishing Research Consortium (http://www.publishingresearch.net) is a group of associations and publishers, which supports global research into scholarly communication in order to enable evidence-based discussion.  Our objective is to support work that is scientific and pro-scholarship. Overall, we aim to promote an understanding of the role of publishing and its impact on research and teaching.