0.6 Creative approaches and alternatives  (Page 6/7)

The open access movement

The Open Access (OA) movement seeks to increase the public availability of works of scholarship. It was provoked by a rapid rise in the price of scientific journals, forcing many libraries to cancel journal subscriptions. The movement claims that authors should be able to access freely their colleagues’ research for the benefit of science and the general public.

OA journals offer articles to the public online for free. They often use very open online licenses, such as the Creative Commons Attribution license. This strategy is sometimes known as “Gold Open Access.” Because they forgo traditional sources of revenue, OA journals must devise alternative business models. Some charge authors for publication of their work. Others rely entirely the work of volunteers.

Some journals are not OA journals, but authorize the authors of the articles they publish to archive versions of their articles in institutional repositories set up by their universities. This strategy is sometimes called “Green Open Access.” Some Green Open Access journals also allow authors to upload their work to free, discipline-specific public repositories, like the  Social Science Research Network . Journal copyright policies regarding self-archiving are analyzed by the project  Sherpa RoMEO . More than 50% of pay-journal policies allow their authors to archive their pre-print articles in open access repositories.

Some journals do not generally allow authors to host open-copies of their articles on their own websites. In these situations, authors may formally request that the publishing contract allow them to do so. Several addendum models are available. "SCAE," the  Science Commons Scholars’ Copyright Addendum Engine  generates one such form.

Funding institutions can facilitate or compel the use of one or more of these strategies -- by encouraging or requiring grant recipients to make the fruits of their projects publicly available. Currently, the National Institutes of Health in the United States, the European Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom require their grantees to make their work publicly accessible.

Universities can also help. Harvard University has led the way on this issue. Starting in 2008, some schools within Harvard have required faculty members to provide the university with a non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to distribute their scholarly articles for non-commercial uses. However, a faculty member may override this default rule by obtaining a waiver for a specific article.

Back to the case study

Angela complains to Nadia that she cannot include in her course pack the article from a colleague because he transferred his rights to the publisher. Nadia informs Angela that some publishers have very strict policies, but that sometimes publishing contracts are in fact less restrictive than some authors may think. Together, they will search for the journal policy to see whether the article could be included.

Together, they will browse  Sherpa RoMEO  because it “provides a listing of publishers' copyright conditions as they relate to authors archiving their work on-line.”