Just to clarify two things that were in my earlier message:

- Pion doesn't take copyright from authors. The point you are making about copyright not being owned by the publisher is exactly the point of the 'licence to publish' that I quoted from (see the first line quoted: 'Copyright remains yours...'). And the stuff about authors using or reusing their work is clear in that licence too (see 4.1).

- Pion does allow authors to deposit work in a repository, but the post-print has to wait until 12 months after publication (4.2). Yes that's a restriction on putting it in a repository, but I'm not convinced Pion is 'more restrictive' - using the site you mention its policies appear to be ranked the same as those of many leading geography journals.

Stuart

 

Rebecca Kennison wrote:

Yes, the costs are real. There is no reason, however, for copyright to be the mechanism for selling. Authors can retain rights and publishers can have a license from the author to sell the content on their behalf and can recoup their costs that way, if they so choose. These are not mutually exclusive arrangements. What usually happens, however, is that authors completely sign over their rights -- meaning they themselves cannot use or reuse their own work, while they themselves also often see no direct financial benefit. The publisher does not need copyright to make money -- but the author does need some retain some rights to be able to use the work in a way or ways he/she would like, including sharing it with others.

As it happens, most journals allow authors negotiate terms and to use and reuse some version of their work, if the author requests it. Most publishers also as a matter of course allow authors to deposit some form of their work in their repository. (Pion is more restrictive than others in that regard.) You can see what journals allow what use to be made of the articles by looking at a site called SHERPA RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/), which attempts to stay up with those policies.

To make their lives easier, some subscription journals have in fact adopted some sort of Creative Commons license so that they don't have to deal with all the different addenda now in circulation, especially from universities such as Harvard and MIT that have resolutions requiring their faculty to deposit their work in their institutional repository. Increasingly funding agencies around the world also require this kind of addendum be appended to work supported by the funding agency, as they also require public sharing of the output of research funded by their agencies. This has made publications more readily available, but also has not had substantive impact on the finances of the publishers. That is because -- let me repeat this again -- a publisher does not need to *own* the copyright of the work to make money from it; the publisher needs merely to have been given license by the creator of the work to sell the piece.

That's not to say there's not a lot of money involved, but I also wouldn't pin my hopes on subscriptions remaining the best way to fund the system. Forward-thinking commercial publishers and societies, as well as those long-time (and more recent) open-access publishers or groups of academics, are looking at funding models that don't rely on subscriptions, which, especially in this economic environment, look increasingly shaky as funding is cut to libraries and that may mean the death of journals once prized by the community. That every single major commercial publisher is now publishing open-access journals, complete with Creative Commons licensing, tells an interesting tale. The times they are a changin'.

Best regards,
Rebecca Kennison



On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Stuart Elden <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


	In response to Rebecca Kenniston, it would be interesting to see how publishers of journals reacted to somebody appending this to their copyright forms.
	
	The Environment and Planning journals are published by Pion, who are a small, independent, publisher. Several people work for Pion - copyeditors, production people, etc. They pay for the journal managers that work with academic editors on each journal (and give editors a small honorarium). The costs of putting together these journals are, therefore, real. Publishers recoup those costs by charging subscriptions for the material, in print or online. We can argue that subscription costs are too high (they are), or that they don't provide adequate recompense to editors, support the administrative work adequately etc. But publishers do incur costs.
	
	Now some journals - ACME or Surveillance and Society, for instance - don't work on that basis. They might get funding from other sources or rely on a great deal of unpaid labour. I co-edited the first four issues of Foucault Studies, which worked on a similar basis. As well as the academic editing I did copy-editing, and pdf layout. Colleagues did this too, and designed the website. It was a huge amount of work. Free to the authors and readers, yes, but certainly not without cost.
	
	Now if everyone insists on adding exceptions to their publishing contracts, and putting things up online as free access immediately, why would publishers continue to do this work? If there is no incentive to pay for the subscription, then why would anyone do that? If publishers don't make money, then I expect that they will not publish. But this is not to say they will not publish at all; rather they would be likely to refuse to publish that author's piece. Note that the 'addendum' generated by that website requires the publisher to sign too. And given that most of the journals that your departments and universities want you to publish in, and, I suspect, that most people want to publish in, are run by commercial publishers, there would be a stand off.
	
	Lest people think this is a simple defence of the status quo, let me suggest another way. There can be a compromise between locking a paper away behind a paywall and making it completely free access. The addendum in most of its forms is actually close to most, though not quite all, the things that the Environment and Planning journals do already. Basically they allow some flexibility. They don't have simple copyright forms for authors, but have a 'licence to publish'. This gives some rights to Pion, and allows authors to retain some rights. Some excerpts:
	
	
	
	Copyright remains yours but by signing this form, you (the author(s)) agree to grant Pion Ltd the exclusive right both to reproduce and/or to distribute your article (including the abstract) ourselves throughout the world in printed, electronic, or other medium...
	
	You assert your Moral Right to be identified as the author(s), and we promise that we shall respect that right. Thus we will ensure that your name(s) is/are always clearly associated with the article, and, while you do allow us to make necessary editorial changes, we shall not make any substantial alteration to your article without consulting you.
	
	You also retain the right to use the version of your article (provided you give full acknowledgement of the published original) as follows, as long as this does not conflict with our reasonable commercial interests:
	
	4.1 For the internal educational or other purposes of your own institution or company; mounted on your personal or university web page; in whole or in part as the basis for your own further publications or spoken presentations.
	
	4.2 In addition you may post a copy of the originally submitted article (a 'preprint') or a copy of the version of your article incorporating changes made during peer review (a 'postprint') to a free public institutional or subject repository, not sooner than one year after publication in the journal; any such copy must include the following notice:
	
	"[Name of author(s), year]. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, volume, issue, pages, year, [DOI] ".
	
	
	
	4.2 might be more carefully worded, but it means - and have checked this with Pion and asked that it is clarified - that it provides the author the right to immediately post the paper open access, in the form it was originally submitted to the journal - i.e. without the editorial work, peer review and the copy-editing. This can be to a personal or institutional website, but not a repository. And one year later, an author can post the final version of the text, but not in the pdf form that was the result of the publisher's production work.
	
	That's about as generous as any commercial publisher is likely to be, I suspect. Other than allowing the full article - in the journal's own style - to be posted it provides the key elements of what seems to be wanted.
	
	In addition, I've been using the journal's blog to make some papers open access, at times. So if someone writes something for the blog - an interview, a reflection, etc. - we generally make the paper it links to open access. And then there is the recent virtual theme issue on 'urban disorder on policing' or the highlight papers, etc.
	
	And many people make use of their own institutional on-line libraries - whose staff are usually very good at working out what can, and can't, be put online, and when. In addition I have a page on my personal site that links to all the pieces of mine that are available either legitimately open access or that someone else has posted up. It's also worth noting that authors are generally allowed to give copies of pdfs to their contacts, and I don't think I've ever been refused when I've contacted an author to ask for a piece I'm finding it hard to access in another way. I've certainly never refused myself when an article has been requested
	
	Anything more radical would really require something more fundamental to change. It would basically be saying that we don't want the best journals to be ones published by commercial publishers. That may well be an aspiration to support. But to change that would require more than simply appending something to copyright forms.
	
	Stuart