One example of this open access republishing trend is the work of Dr. Ray M. Bowen, Professor and President Emeritus of Texas A&M. Thanks to Dr. Bowen’s efforts to reclaim the rights to his previously published works, three books previously sold under the imprint of Plenum Press have now been freely republished in the Texas A&M Digital Repository (Dr. Bowen’s digital collection is online at http://repository.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/2500.) These titles now see wide usage from around the world.

If a TAMU author believes that demand exists for his or her out-of-print publication, s/he is encouraged to explore whether the rights to that work can revert back to the author. Historically, the standard language in book contracts required that authors transfer to the publisher the right to reproduce the work and the right to distribute copies of the work to the public. Such contracts also contained a reversion of rights clause by which the publisher’s rights terminated if/when the book went out of print.

Authors wishing to pursue a reversion of their rights need to check the original publishing contract, if available, to see if an appropriate clause was included. It may be necessary to write to the publisher’s rights and permissions department to clarify the procedure for reclaiming reverted rights.

Once rights have reverted to an author, s/he is invited to digitally republish the work via the Texas A&M Digital Repository. There is no cost to the author or the users for this service, and it provides an easy and effective way to extend the life of the work for many years to come.

Information about submitting works to the Texas A&M Repository is available online or by contacting the Libraries’ Digital Services & Scholarly Communication Office at digital@library.tamu.edu

Following the models of the other campus OA mandates, Rollins faculty have agreed to grant to their institution nonexclusive permission to make available the final, peer-reviewed, manuscript version accepted for publication of his or her scholarly articles. Faculty concerned with publishing pressures (e.g., tenure expectations) or facing unanticipated circumstances may request a waiver, or “opt out,” of the institutional license for a given article.

In sharing the news of their new open access policy, Rollins officials credited faculty advocates for their excellent in work in championing the importance of a campus-wide mandate. Dr. Thom Moore, Physics Professor, serves as Chair of the Faculty’s Professional Standards Committee and as Director of the school’s Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Program. Dr. Claire Strom, History Professor, is Editor of the journal “Agricultural History”.

In addition to the important leadership demonstrated by these faculty, the entire Rollins community actively contributed to campus OA efforts through awareness-raising activities and programs on various issues of scholarly communication. The campus publishes its own Open Access journal, Rollins Undergraduate Research Journal. Through the Scholar-In-Residence Program, the campus hosted Dr. Peter Suber, leading advocate of the Open Access Movement for scholarly publication, who presented “Open Access: Implications for the Future of Scholarly Communications” and “Open Access and Libraries: A Roundtable discussion.” The college library published a piece on “Open Access: What is it and why should you care?” in their newsletter.

Additional information and news about the Rollins Open Access policy is avialable via the Library Director’s blog.

Each journal record in RoMEO displays a color code to classify the publisher’s archiving policies and inform authors of what can be done with their articles. The coding system differentiates between two versions of the article:

1. Pre-prints, representing the first draft of the article, before peer-review has been applied;
2. Post-prints, the revised version of the paper after peer-review. Post-prints have the same content as the final version of the article, as published in the journal but do not reflect the publisher’s final type-setting and formatting.

With either version, authors typically cannot use the publisher-generated PDF file. Rather, they must make their own .pdf versions for submission to a repository.

The color-coding system used in the RoMEO database follows this scheme:

• Green = can archive pre-print and post-print
• Blue = can archive post-print
• Yellow = can archive pre-print
• White = archiving not formally supported

Note that RoMEO’s color-coding system does not include “gold”, a term sometimes used in open access parlance to describe open access publishers where all versions of an article may be freely shared online. RoMEO treats OA journals as green.

Of the 704 publishers included in the RoMEO database at present, 63% formally allow some form of self-archiving. Among these, 198 (28%) are green; 173 are blue (25%); and 72 (18%) are yellow. (source: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/statistics.php)

The RoMEO database is maintained by the SHERPA Project (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research, Preservation and Access) and generously funded by the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

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In addition to searching, downloading and reading papers from the site, Texas A&M faculty contribute pre-publication versions of research articles to arXiv.

The full text of Cornell’s press release follows. (more…)

Policies Should Protect Peer-Reviewed Publications While Ensuring Rapid Access

An expert panel of librarians, library scientists, publishers, and university academic leaders today called on federal agencies that fund research to develop and implement policies that ensure free public access to the results of the research they fund “as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.”

The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was convened last summer by the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Policymakers asked the group to examine the current state of scholarly publishing and seek consensus recommendations for expanding public access to scholarly journal articles.

The various communities represented in the Roundtable have been working to develop recommendations that would improve public access without curtailing the ability of the scientific publishing industry to publish peer-reviewed scientific articles. (more…)

Dr. Frischer is a Professor in the Classics Department of the University of Virginia, where from 2004-09 he also served as Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. He is currently Director of the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory, whose mission is to apply 3D digital tools to simulating cultural heritage artifacts and sites as heuristic instruments of discovery. (more…)