Implications of Copyright Evolution for the Future of Scholarly Communication and Grey Literature

Abstract

Traditional practices regarding copyright are undergoing transformation. Although it is still common for scholars to give up their rights to their articles so that they will be published, this happens less frequently than it once did. Our analysis of the RoMEO database [1] shows that 75% of publishers allow authors to post their work in an online repository, whether that repository is hosted by their institution or on a personal web page. Whatever becomes of the open access movement to make all peer-reviewed journal articles immediately available online, copyright liberalization represents an enduring legacy of the open access movement. Online repositories are a more natural home for grey literature than open access journals. Repositories can store working papers and technical reports (among other content types) just as easily as peer-reviewed articles. Crucially, repositories can also store raw data, the grey content that lies at the root of much scholarly discovery. Copyright liberalization has encouraged the proliferation of such repositories; one prominent example is arXiv, which primarily serves physicists and computer scientists [2]. As scholarly discourse evolves, the preservation and promotion of grey content should command more energy than providing access to discrete grey literature