Often, scholarly publishers require authors to transfer their rights to publishing companies before their research will be published in an academic journal. Academic librarians and other library departments can support faculty and student authors by helping them understand what they give up when they transfer their copyrights to a publisher. For example, scholarly authors who transfer copyright could lose the ability to post their research on their own websites.
Several tools exist to help faculty and scholars understand their rights and publishing options, and to help them exercise those rights. The Termination of Transfer tool,[1] co-stewarded by the Authors Alliance and Creative Commons, gives authors who have previously entered into publishing agreements information about whether and how they can regain the publication rights that they previously assigned away so they can publish on new terms, including under a CC license if they choose. The Scholars Copyright Addendum Engine[2] can be used by faculty and other authors to amend publication agreements when they are submitting an article to a traditional publisher. The engine allows authors to choose among different options to reserve rights for themselves and generates an agreement that is then submitted with a traditional publication agreement to make that legally effective. Additionally, the Authors Alliance publishes myriad resources about these tools and open access, and PLOS offers resources and articles about the benefits of open access as well.
Academic librarians can also help scholars understand how different publishing options affect both the audience and the prestige of their work. The “impact factor” is a primary metric of the prominence of a journal or publication, measured by the number of times the average article in a particular journal has been cited (in other sources) in one year. Because impact factors are not necessarily a reliable metric of a journal’s importance, some publishers like Nature Research, the publisher of the prestigious scientific journal Nature, are reconsidering the importance of impact factors for journals. Many Open Access scholars encourage systems like altmetrics to provide another way of thinking about impact beyond the traditional metrics. In 2017, Science released a study finding that on average, open access papers had a fifty percent higher research impact than strictly “paywalled” papers.[3] For more information, read Jon Tennant’s 2016 article (https://f1000research.com/articles/5-632/v1) on the academic, societal, and economic advantages of open access.
NOTES
- ↑ Currently, the Termination of Transfer tool covers U. S. copyright and contracts controlled by U. S. law only. Creative Commons is working to expand the tool to provide information and resources about provisions with similar effect around the world.
- ↑ The SCAE and the addenda are being updated by Creative Commons in 2018.
- ↑ Éric Archambault, Grégoire Côté, Brooke Struck and Matthieu Voorons, Research Impact of Paywalled Versus Open Access Papers, (Quebec, Canada: Science-Metrix and 1Science, 2016) http://www.1science.com/1numbr/.
