RoMEO Studies 2: how academics want to protect their open-access research papers

This paper is the second in a series of studies (see Gadd, E., C. Oppenheim, and S. Probets. RoMEO Studies 1: The impact of copyright ownership on author-self-archiving. Journal of Documentation. 59(3) 243-277) emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers the protection for research papers afforded by UK copyright law, and by e-journal licences. It compares this with the protection required by academic authors for open-access research papers as discovered by the RoMEO academic author survey. The survey used the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) as a framework for collecting views from 542 academics as to the permissions, restrictions, and conditions they wanted to assert over their works. Responses from self-archivers and non-archivers are compared. Concludes that most academic authors are primarily interested in preserving their moral rights, and that the protection offered research papers by copyright law is way in excess of that required by most academics. It also raises concerns about the level of protection enforced by e-journal licence agreements

An investigation into stakeholders' approaches to copyright ownership in university-produced scholarly works and the effect on access to UK scholarship

This thesis considers the various perspectives of universities, academic staff and publishers to the copyright ownership of teaching and research outputs produced by UK universities, with a particular focus on how this affects the provision of online and/or open access to those outputs by university libraries. It presents ten papers written over a twenty year time frame that consider these issues within the context of a number of practitioner research projects and demonstrate how practices are changing over time. The papers employ a range of methodologies including questionnaire surveys, comparative design studies, interviews and content analyses. The key findings relating to research outputs (the scholarly royalty-free literature) are that rights are still mainly relinquished to academic staff by UK HEIs, although some HEIs are beginning to assert the right to re-use those works in various ways. Whilst academics are relied upon to either retain copyright or communicate their HEI s copyright policy terms to publishers, in most cases they (reluctantly) assign copyright to publishers. Publishers are increasingly allowing green open access to their scholarly works in some form, but under a growing array of restrictions and conditions principally embargo periods. Publishers terms of re-use for such works (when made explicit) are often restrictive, however most academics would be happy for their works to be re-used non-commercially as long as their moral rights remain protected. This situation creates challenges for both Institutional Repository Managers and copyright clearance staff in Libraries to manage access to, and re-use of, these outputs. The key findings relating to teaching outputs are that copyright mainly lies with HEIs although there are signs that HEIs are moving towards a shared ownership position through licensing. Academics seem to expect some degree of shared ownership, but as with research outputs, are principally concerned that their moral rights are protected. UK HEI copyright policies in this area are fledgling and do not comprehensively address either moral rights issues or other key copyright issues pertaining to OERs. Failure of universities to address these issues is impacting on the motivation of academics to share OERs

Academics' online presence guidelines: A four step guide to taking control of your visibility

OpenUCT published Academics' online presence guidelines: A four step guide to taking control of your visibility in 2012

The IPR issues facing self-archiving: key findings of the RoMEO Project

Introduction Inspired by the Open Archives Initiative, the United Kingdom (UK) Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) established the FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Repositories) programme in 2002. One of the programme's objectives was to "explore the challenges associated with disclosure and sharing [of content], including IPR and the role of institutional repositories". To this end, the JISC funded a one-year project called RoMEO (Rights Metadata for Open archiving). RoMEO, which took place between 2002–2003, specifically looked at the self-archiving of academic research papers, and the subsequent disclosure and harvesting of metadata about those papers using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) by OAI Data and Service Providers [Open Archives Initiative, 2002a]. The RoMEO project aimed to develop simple rights metadata by which academics could protect their research papers in an open-access environment and also to develop a means by which OAI Data and Service Providers could protect their open-access metadata. RoMEO proposed to show how such rights solutions might be disclosed and harvested under OAI-PMH. The RoMEO project was divided into two phases: a data-gathering phase and a development phase. The project team produced a series of six studies based on their work [Gadd, Oppenheim, and Probets, 2003a; 2003b, 2003c, 2003d, 2003e, 2003f]. (In the remainder of this article, these studies will be referred to as RoMEO Studies 1–6). This article aims to provide an overview of all the activities of the RoMEO project and to report on its key findings and recommendations

UK university policy approaches towards the copyright ownership of scholarly works and the future of open access

Purpose: Considers how the open access policy environment has developed since the RoMEO (Rights Metadata for Open Archiving) Project’s call in 2003 for universities and academics to assert joint copyright ownership of scholarly works. Investigates whether UK universities are moving towards joint copyright ownership. Design: Analyses 81 UK university copyright policies are analysed to understand what proportion make a claim over i) IP ownership of all outputs; ii) the copyright in scholarly works; iii) re-using scholarly works in specific ways; iv) approaches to moral rights. Results are cross-tabulated by policy age and mission group. Findings: Universities have not asserted their interest in scholarly works through joint ownership, leaving research funders and publishers to set open access policy. Finds an increased proportion of universities assert a generic claim to all IP (87%) relative to earlier studies. 74% of policies relinquished rights in scholarly works in favour of academic staff. 20% of policies share ownership of scholarly works through licensing. 28% of policies assert the right to reuse scholarly works in some way. 32% of policies seek to protect moral rights. Policies that ‘share’ ownership of scholarly works are more recent. The UK Scholarly Communication Licence (UK-SCL) should have an impact on this area. The reliance on individual academics to enforce a copyright policy or not to opt out of the UK-SCL could be problematic. Concludes that open access may still be best served by joint ownership of scholarly works. Originality: This the first large-scale analysis of UK university policy positions towards scholarly works. Discovers for the first time a move towards ‘shared’ ownership of scholarly works in copyright policies

IPR issues facing open access

The UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project is investigating the IPR issues related to the ‘selfarchiving’ of research papers by academics and the subsequent disclosure and harvesting of metadata about those research papers using the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). During the first phase of the project we performed online questionnaire surveys of four key stakeholder groups: academic authors, journal publishers, OAI Data Providers and Service Providers. We have also performed a very interesting analysis of 80 journal publishers’ Author Copyright Agreements. The principle outcomes of the project are, firstly, the development of some simple rights metadata by which academics might protect their research papers in an open access environment, and secondly, a means of protecting the rights in all that freely available metadata that may soon be available

Developing IPR solutions for academic author self-archiving

This paper describes the work of the UK JISC-funded RoMEO (Rights Metadata for open archiving) project. It reports on a survey of 542 academic authors and an analysis of 80 journal publishers’ copyright transfer agreements, and how they have informed the development of some simple rights metadata by which academics can protect their research papers in an open access environment. It also reports on a survey of 22 OAI Data Providers and 13 OAI Service Providers, and how the results have informed the development of a “metadata protection solution” that describes the conditions of use of freely available metadata

Academics and copyright ownership: ignorant, confused or misled?

Academics and copyright ownership: ignorant, confused or misled

Documentation for institutional repositories

In order to identify best practice, the documentation of seven academic institutional repositories(IRs) was compared and contrasted. This was followed by semi-structured interviews with six practitioners experienced in the set-up, management and maintenance of IRs, including representatives of three JISC FAIR projects. The aim was to identify the requirements of policy documentation provided by IRs. Although many issues were found to be handled differently depending on what IR software was used, or the stage of development of the IR, several common factors emerged. These included the importance of developing the documentation in collaboration with individual academics, departments and senior management whose views and needs are central to the success of the IR. Additional findings were that policies should be formulated only when the purpose and aims of the IR have been clearly defined and that the IR documentation itself should be concise and easy to understand, with the rights and responsibilities of stakeholders clearly presented

Journal copyright transfer agreements: their effect on author self archiving

This paper reports on the results of an analysis of 80 copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) with particular regard to their effect on author self-archiving. It shows the number of CTAs asking for copyright assignment, the time of assignment and what happens when copyright cannot be assigned. It outlines the warranties required of the author, and the exceptions granted back to the author by which they may use their own work. In particular it focuses on the number of CTAs allowing selfarchiving and the conditions under which they may do so. It concludes that whether an author can safely self-archive or not depends on a complex matrix of the following factors: i) whether copyright assignment or a non-exclusive licence is required; ii) the time of copyright assignment; iii) if (and when) CTA’s actually allow self-archiving; iv) if publishers do not allow self-archiving, but do not see it as ‘prior publication’; v) whether the preprint is legally a separate copyright work to the refereed postprint; and vi) whether the author wishes to self-archive a pre-print, postprint or both