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RoMEO studies 4: an analysis of journal publishers' copyright agreements
Author(s) -
Gadd Elizabeth,
Oppenheim Charles,
Probets Steve
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
learned publishing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.06
H-Index - 34
eISSN - 1741-4857
pISSN - 0953-1513
DOI - 10.1087/095315103322422053
Subject(s) - warrant , metadata , copyright law , intellectual property , work (physics) , public domain , library science , copyright act , political science , law and economics , computer science , law , world wide web , sociology , business , history , engineering , finance , mechanical engineering , archaeology
This article is the fourth in a series of six emanating from the UK JISC‐funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open archiving). It describes an analysis of 80 scholarly journal publishers' copyright agreements with a particular view to their effect on author self‐archiving: 90% of agreements asked for copyright transfer and 69% asked for it prior to refereeing the paper; 75% asked authors to warrant that their work had not been previously published although only two explicitly stated that they viewed self‐archiving as prior publication; 28.5% of agreements provided authors with no usage rights over their own paper. Although 42.5% allowed self‐archiving in some format, there was no consensus on the conditions under which self‐archiving could take place. The article concludes that author–publisher copyright agreements should be reconsidered by a working party representing the needs of both parties.