Dear all,
This is an email to attempt to summarise a wide-ranging talk I gave to a Copyright Workshop held by the CAUL Australasian Institutional Repository Support Service (CAIRSS). Based loosely on the idea of ‘complying with funding mandates’ I simply mentioned a series of items that I have discovered recently that I thought was interesting in this area. It may be of interest to you.
Some publishers will only allow green OA (or OA at all) to researchers under a mandate if the funding body has come to a ‘separate agreement’ with the publisher.
• Elsevier – Researchers can place works into a repository but not in subject-oriented or centralized repositories or institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specific agreement with the publisher
• Wiley Blackwell – No to placing an Accepted Version into a repository UNLESS they are funded with a funding organisation that has a specific agreement with Wiley Blackwell
• Taylor & Francis are ‘yellow’ according to Sherpa RoMEO, but are green after embargo.
• Springer is a green publisher.
Elsevier has arrangements with 14 funders (each agreement is individually linked out from http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/fundingbodyagreements):
Arthritis Research Campaign (UK), Austrian Science Fund (FWF), BBSRC, British Heart Foundation (UK), Cancer Research (UK), Chief Scientist Office, Department of Health (UK), Dunhill Medical Trust , ESRC, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US), Medical Research Council (UK), National Institutes of Health (US), Telethon (Italy), Wellcome Trust (UK)
Wiley has agreements with five (http://olabout.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-406074.html):
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Telethon, Wellcome Trust, Austrian Science Fund, NIH
The thing that is interesting is that the different agreements range in what the publisher is prepared to do. They match each other (the arrangements NIH have with Wiley matches the one it has with Elsevier, for example).
The agreements range from the ‘opportunity’ to comply by paying for hybrid open access, where the funder picks up the tab (eg: Wellcome Trust and Telethon), to the publisher depositing the Final Version into Pub Med central after 12 months (NIH) or the publisher depositing the Accepted Version after 6 months (Howard Hughes Medical Institute).
It would be interesting to know how Howard Hughes managed this much more open access friendly outcome (I will try and find out).
Bear in mind that the cost of paying for the ‘opportunity’ is expensive:
US$3,000 per article for all Elsevier journals
except Cell Press: US$5,000 per article fee, and
The Lancet, which will have a fee of £400 per page.
I sent an email to Elsevier in March 2012 asking : “The question about the 12 Open Access journals is also related to the ‘sponsored open access’ articles where an author pays $3000 to make an article available open access within an otherwise subscription article … Are the articles only available via ScienceDirect?
The response avoided the hybrid question by responding about their open access publications:
“[[Anne]] Currently there are 11 of the 13 Journals listed on the Elsevier website that are available to the public anywhere from any computer. This is regardless of whether the user has access to ScienceDirect. To access the journals visit www.sciencedirect.com search for journal. At present articles only go back to December 2011. The 2 journals that are not on Science Direct 1 - Applied & Translational Genomics & 8 - Physics of the Dark Universe are new journals and do not have any articles published yet. Additionally these journals will be made available via PubMedCentral.”
I have sent an email to follow this up and get clarification.
Elsevier – even after researchers pay for gold OA, “If authors want to submit a version of the work in an open access repository they must seek permission from the Global Rights Department before articles are posted within an open access repository http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/rights”
Wiley Blackwell are slightly better - In addition to publication online via Wiley Online Library, authors of OnlineOpen articles are permitted to post the final, published PDF of their article on a website, institutional repository, or other free public server, immediately on publication
The last meeting of the AUSGOAL practitioners group (which consists of people from CSIRO, the Dept of Environment, Geoscience Australia and others) agreed that they should convene a subgroup consisting of government employees who are scientists who are negotiating agreements with publishers under Crown Copyright. They will widen the group to include State Govt scientists too and intend to connect with the research sector.
This subgroup is intended to harmonise their dealing with publishers in the open agenda. There is concern the publishers will try to ‘divide and conquer’, making up special deals with different departments that benefit the publisher, not Crown Copyright.
NOTE that government scientists are not subject to the same institutional (reporting and employer) publication requirements for promotion and grants as academic scientists. So in some ways they are stronger in their negotiation - they do not ‘have’ to publish in a particular journal for promotion, so have more leeway to say they will refuse to publish with a particular publisher on the basis of their copyright rules.
Academic researchers are far more restricted, both by their institutional promotion systems and by ERA and HERDC reporting.
They have reverted to a weak position – the action of researchers/institutions depends on publishers copyright rules
Note that while the Principal Investigator has the requirement for making the work OA, it is usually the Corresponding Author who has the final version of the article (the Accepted Version). If they are at different institutions this could be a problem.
Wellcome Trust only had 50% compliance at the beginning of this year so they have changed their rules http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Policy-and-position-statements/WTD018855.htm#nine
Wellcome-funded research papers detailed in applications submitted to the Trust are reviewed to ensure compliance. Where Trust-funded researchers have not complied with our open access policy, three sanctions will apply:
• If non-compliant papers are identified in an End of Grant Report, the Trust will withhold the final 10 per cent of the 'total transferable funds' budget on the grant until all papers comply. See 10 per cent retention policy.
• Applicants will be required to ensure that Trust-funded papers resulting from current or previous grants are compliant before formal notification of any funding renewals or new grants can be activated.
• Researchers will not be permitted to include any non-compliant Wellcome-funded publications in any application submitted to the Trust, and such papers will be discounted from consideration of a researcher's track record.
• These sanctions apply to all original Trust-funded research papers published from 1 October 2009 onwards.
Note while the new NHMRC policy and Wellcome Trust clamping down on compliance is good for open access, it might cause angst and anger rather than support amongst academia. Some at ANU have expressed concern about being the ‘meat in the sandwich’ in the argument between funders and publishers.
Dr Danny Kingsley
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Manager, Scholarly Communications and ePublishing
Division of Information
Room 3.12b
Chifley Library, Building 15
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
T: +612 6125 6839
W: http://research.anu.edu.au/access
Cricos Provider - 00120C
NOTE: I work three days a week: Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. I think about open access 24/7.