Weren’t able to attend last Friday’s workshop “You Know What You Write, But Do You Know Your Rights? Understanding and Protecting Your Rights As an Author”? Attended but want to review the materials again, at your own pace? Here are all the materials shown and discussed at the event — and a few extras, to boot!
You might notice that “moral rights” are mentioned in the Journal of Library Innovation agreement. Moral rights have to do with the right to be attributed and the right to control the fate/integrity of a work. The Journal of Library Innovation doesn’t touch moral rights, but it was just reported with horror that the Nature Publishing Group asks authors to waive moral rights to articles published in their journals! Here are two articles on that topic: Nature Publishing Group Requires Faculty Authors to Waive ‘Moral Rights’ (from the Chronicle of Higher Education) and Attacking Academic Values (from the Scholarly Communications @ Duke blog).
More about licenses:
Creative Commons: licenses that allow content creators to modify traditional copyright terms for their benefit and/or the benefit of others
Why CC-BY: an argument by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association in favor of the CC-BY license
(Déjà vu? This post is a very slight reworking of a post I wrote last week for the fantastic JustPublics@365 blog.)
Discussion about open access often focuses exclusively on open access journals, and often on the extreme ends of the quality spectrum: the reallyexcellentjournals and the really awful ones. There’s a lot of fascinating and nuanced and ever-evolving stuff to say about open access journals, but there’s a whole lot more to open access. And today I’m going to talk about open access repositories, freely accessible online databases of articles and other works.
What Are Open Access Repositories?
Thanks to Google (and the irrepressible urge to research health symptoms), you’ve almost certainly found and read materials in open access repositories, but you might not have realized that there was anything special about the sites hosting those document.
One reason open access repositories are special is that they’re created and maintained with long-term preservation in mind. They will persist, and offer persistent URLs to documents, much longer than most other sites. In particular, they will outlast authors’ personal web pages, which often disappear shortly after retirement, resignation, death, or failure to pay for domain name renewal. So, unlike most free web content, works in open access repositories aren’t just open access now and a year from now; they’re open access for a very long time to come — ideally, forever.
Types of Repositories
There is no single, universal open access repository, but that’s okay because Google and other tools search across many repositories and generally do a good job of finding what you’re looking for, wherever it may reside. Here are some of the different flavors of open access repositories:
Disciplinary repositories are repositories that welcome submissions in a certain field, regardless of the institutional home of the author(s). Some of the biggest and best-known disciplinary repositories are arXiv.org (for physics, math, computer science, and several other sciences), PubMed Central (for the biomedical sciences), and the Social Science Research Network, or SSRN (for the social sciences). One big benefit of disciplinary repositories is that they collect a large amount of related research in one place, so it’s often well worth a researcher’s time to go directly to the appropriate repository and browse or search for papers of interest. Of course, some disciplinary repositories are more robust than others, and, while there are many, there is not a repository for every field.
Institutional repositories are repositories hosted by an institution (usually a college or university) to make available the works of its researchers. Successful examples include the repositories at MIT and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. One big benefit of institutional repositories is that they accept all kinds of documents — slideshows, posters, speaker’s notes, images, etc. — whereas many disciplinary repositories limit themselves to articles/papers.
Commercial networking/profile sites, such as Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and Mendeley, allow researchers to create profile pages and upload their works. These sites have helped many researchers (including those who don’t have an appropriate disciplinary repository or an institutional repository at their disposal) make their works open access, and have connected many others with those works. But the commercial nature of these sites make some worry about what’s being done with data about users and contributions, as well as about the longevity of the sites and the fate of the documents if the sites shut.
To explore the universe of repositories, visit OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) and ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories).
And here’s some really big news: The CUNY Graduate Center is on the verge of rolling out its own repository — there’s almost nothing there yet, but soon it’ll have lots of papers, dissertations, master’s theses, and other works. And here’s even bigger news: CUNY will soon be following suit with a university-wide repository!
Sneak peek of the Graduate Center’s soon-to-be-unveiled repository: Academic Works
Is All This Allowed? Isn’t It Pirating?
Sure, researchers can put all sorts of research output online. But what about their journal articles — aren’t a lot of journals commercial, and don’t journals require authors to transfer their copyright to the journal?
Yes, a lot of journals are for-profit enterprises, and yes, those journals almost always require authors to sign over their copyright. Nevertheless, a majority of journals allow authors to self-archive their articles (usually not the final PDF, but some version) in open access repositories. (Find out which journals allow what at SHERPA/RoMEO.)
So, yep, all this is allowed, and, nope, using repositories is not pirating!
You are invited to an event in the Information Interventions @ CUNY series:
You Know What You Write, But Do You Know Your Rights? Understanding and Protecting Your Rights As an Author
Image found on easel.ly. Creator unknown. Click to embiggen.
When you publish a journal article, you sign a copyright agreement. Do you know what you’re agreeing to when you sign it? Different journals have different policies:
Some journals require you to relinquish your copyright. (You then have to ask permission or even pay to share your article with students and colleagues!)
Some journals allow you to retain some rights (e.g., the right to post online).
Some journals leave copyright in your hands. (You simply give the journal a non-exclusive license to publish the article.)
How can you find out a journal’s policy? How can you negotiate your contract to make the most of your rights as a scholar, researcher, and author? Come learn how to preserve your rights to reproduce, distribute, and display the work you create.
And what about articles you’ve already published? What did you sign when you were publishing them? Bring agreements you signed in the past, and we’ll examine what you agreed to, as well as what options you have now for altering the terms.
Friday, March 28, 2014
2pm – 4pm
Graduate Center, Room C197 (Concourse Level)
Space is limited! Please RSVP at http://tinyurl.com/cunyrights
There is one more Information Interventions @ CUNY coming up this year: Stay tuned for a panel about the controversy surrounding dissertations and open access!
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