Legal and copyright issues: experiences and adviceMorag Greig

Outline

• How does copyright affect repositories?• Institutions and copyright• Publishers and copyright• Publisher conditions• Copyright checking process at Glasgow• Experiences with publishers• OA journals and copyright• Licensing schemes

How does copyright affect repositories?

• Many repositories contain published material• All material has a rights holder• In the UK the rights holder for journal articles

is often not the author(s) but the publisher• The rights holder controls what acts are

permitted in relation to the publication, i.e. what people can do with it.

• Where authors do not hold the copyright to their articles they may be restricted in what they can do with them

Institutions and copyright

• UK situation is that although in theory institutions hold copyright for publications produced by academics in the course of their work, in practice most institutions do not assert this right

• Publishers are therefore able to ask authors to assign copyright to them

• This would not be possible if institutions exercised their rights, but most institutions are reluctant to do this – seen as being controversial

• Publishers do not need copyright assignment to publish

• Work done on persuading authors to amend copyright agreements or submit their own licenses to publishers

Publishers and copyright

• Until recently, the rights of authors were limited if they had assigned copyright to a publisher

• Authors were not always permitted to distribute articles, to re-use them as e.g. a book chapter or to adapt them

• Many copyright agreements did not include any author rights to make their articles available online

Recent developments

• Over the past 2-3 years publishers have become much more aware of the OA movement

• Publishers have come under pressure to grant more rights back to authors, in particular the right to deposit a copy of the articles in a repository

• Some publishers grant this right back to authors ; others allow authors to sign less restrictive agreements, sometimes called ‘license to publish’ rather than ‘copyright transfer agreement’

Publisher conditions

• Most publishers only permit authors to deposit their own final version of articles and not the publisher formatted PDF version

• Some publishers only permit deposit after an embargo period, e.g. 6 months or a year after publication

• Some publishers will permit deposit in institutional repositories but not in subject repositories

Problems with publisher conditions

• Many authors keen to deposit older material• However, most did not have suitable

versions of their articles – only the publisher versions

• Some authors were not happy about making their own versions of papers publicly available

• Some authors were discouraged by embargo periods

Copyright checking process

• Repository staff check copyright agreements relating to all material deposited

• Main source of information is SHERPA-RoMEO database of publisher policies (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php)

• If a publisher is not included we check publisher web sites

• If no information is available we contact publishers directly to seek permission

Experiences with publishers

• Not all publishers reply to requests for permission

• We send follow up requests• If we receive no reply we do not make

material available in the repository• Sometimes publishers are more likely to

respond if authors contact them directly• Some publishers have asked for payment,

which we have declined!• Some publishers say no

Copyright and OA journals

• OA journals do not ask authors to assign copyright to them

• Instead they generally ask authors to grant them a non-exclusive license to make articles available

• Authors are generally free to do what they wish with their papers

Creative Commons licenses

• If authors are making their own work available rather than publishing it via any sort of publisher they may wish to attach a license to it

• This will indicate to end users what they can and cannot do with the material

• One scheme which permits authors to attach a license to their work is the Creative Commons scheme

• Licenses have been developed for many countries worldwide

Open access and copyright: some outcomes

• Open access has made authors more aware of the fact that in many cases they were not on control of their work

• Open access has encouraged them to be more active in controlling their work

• Publishers were forced to recognise that authors were not happy with the current set up, and have had to change their policies in this area

• After all, if authors did not submit articles to journals there would be no journals!