7. Challenges – copyright and versions
The main obstacle to the development and growth of IRs is restrictive publisher
copyright policies. When an academic submits an article to a journal, most publishers
will expect them to sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement. This agreement outlines
what rights an author has to re-use their work after its publication. In most cases, the
publisher will allow some form of archiving in repository systems (such as ours): this
varies from whether this is a pre-print or permission to deposit the final version/postprint.
According to the SHERPA website, 64% of publishers will allow post-print
archiving which equates to around 90% of journals
(http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/documents/15concerns.html). However, despite these
permissions, there are usually certain restrictions imposed: the main restriction is that
the publisher PDF cannot be used and others have embargo periods: for example,
Taylor and Francis has an 18-month embargo on social science articles (see
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/copyright.asp). This has led to problems because
there seems to be a general misunderstanding amongst academics about copyright and
the rights they have to re-use their publications after they have signed copyright
transfer agreements. As part of the submission process, we are offering to do any
copyright checking on behalf of authors. This is done using the SHERPA/RoMEO
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database (see http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php) or by contacting publishers
directly with a standard e-mail. RoMEO (Rights Metadata for Open Archiving) was
another JISC-funded project which investigated the rights issues surrounding the 'selfarchiving'
of research in the UK academic community (Gadd et al., 2003). The
process of copyright checking can be quite slow but on the whole permission is given.
The difficult part is obtaining the correct version of the paper as submitted by the
author(s) for publication. Having to use the author final version has raised questions
about quality control and is often thwarted by the fact that academics do not keep
these versions or, for some, that their final version is very different to the version that
is eventually published. Explaining these policies and talking through these issues is
often the most difficult and frustrating part of encouraging people to deposit material.