Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Traditional Journal Publishers Support Author Rights!

A recent statement by the traditional publishing groups STM/PSP/ALPSP indicates that this group sees considerable support for Authors Rights as the industry standard.

From the Statement:

Standard journal agreements typically allow authors:

* To use their published paper in their own teaching and generally within their institution for educational purposes
* To send copies to their research colleagues
* To re-use portions of their paper in further works or book chapters, and
* To post some version of the paper on a pre-print server, their Institutional Repository or a personal web site (though sometimes not for the weekly news-oriented science or medical magazines, for public health and similar reasons)

It is also noteworthy that the language refers to grants of copyright or publishing agreements, an accurate reflection of this moment in the transition to open access, when many, but not all, publishers have moved to a "license to publish" and away from the older and unnecessary copyright transfer agreement.

This is not open access publishing, but still very good news. It is especially good to hear that posting to a pre-print server is considered standard, as this gets the research results out in the open even before publication, never mind after a delay of up to 12 months!

Thanks to STM/PSP/ALPSP for releasing this statement. For more details, links to the statement, and comments, please see Peter Suber's post on Open Access News.