Understanding Your Author Rights, Part Two

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In a previous post, we discussed the importance of understanding, retaining, and exercising your author rights when you’re publishing your work. But what about your earlier publications? If you’re unsure which rights the publisher permitted you to retain and/or can’t find a copy of your Author Agreement or Copyright Transfer Agreement, the following resources may help.

Finding Information Online

RoMEO, managed by SHERPA services out of the UK, is “a searchable database of publisher’s policies regarding the self-archiving of journal articles on the web and in Open Access repositories.” (RoMEO FAQ). You can search by a journal’s title, ISSN, or publisher to find information regarding the journal’s open access options and self-archiving policies, the key information included in the publisher’s boilerplate Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA). RoMEO entries often include publisher contact information.

RoMEO’s data also powers other services such as http://rchive.it/.  Like RoMEO, searching for a journal or publisher will yield information regarding OA and self-archiving policies, but adds explanatory and contextual information designed to assist authors in understanding the fine print.

Contacting the Publisher Directly

In our experience, most publishers are very responsive when it comes to answering authors’ questions regarding permissible uses of their work. While few may be willing to alter a CTA post-publication, it’s not unheard of for specific requests to be honored on a case-by-case basis.

If RoMEO doesn’t include a journal or provide the publisher’s contact information, Ulrichsweb is a good next step. The online directory includes all available contact information for the over 300,000 journals and serials indexed.

If you need additional assistance, we’re here to help! Contact Sarah Leadley, leadley@uw.edu, with your questions.

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Predatory Journal Publishing

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Does this sound familiar? A new message appears in your inbox: the Questionable Journal of Mysterious Origins wants to publish your research! They promise a quick turnaround time and wide readership, increasing the potential impact of your work, all for the low, low price of $300-$3000! But is this really a deal you can’t refuse?

Predatory journal publishing is an increasingly pressing issue in higher education. A study out of Finland reports a significant increase in the number of articles published in predatory journals since 2010. Stories range from the sad, as marginalized scholars succumb to the pressure of publish-or-perish, to the absurd, with Marge Simpson’s foray into computer science. Most recently, the FTC is taking action, filing a civil complaint against one particularly large and pernicious predatory publisher.

What is predatory publishing and why is it spreading? Predatory publishers take advantage of the upsurge in gold Open Access (OA), a digital, peer-reviewed journal publishing model that offers free, online, public access to research, often, though not always, by transferring publishing costs to the author (via Article Processing Charges, or APCs). Many legitimate and highly competitive peer-reviewed journals (such as PLoS Biology and IEEE Access) operate under the gold OA model and levy APCs, which are frequently covered by research funders rather than individual authors. Open access has gained so much traction that, in 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directed federal agencies to develop public access plans, requiring recipients of federal funding to make both their articles and data publically accessible.

With any growing and potentially profitable market, however, comes the opportunity for scammers to exploit the system. Predatory publishers establish charlatan gold OA journals, charging APCs and producing online issues, without establishing or engaging in a rigorous peer review and editorial process. Essentially, they’re designed to take your money and run, copying and pasting your unedited work into poorly designed websites that, at best, may one day be crawled by Google Scholar. Yikes.

So, how does one filter out the sham journals from the legitimate publications? Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado Denver has long produced a directory of predatory journals known as Beall’s List. While this may be a good place to start, it must also be mentioned that Beall and his List have come under criticism of late for some arguably extreme anti-OA views. Furthermore, York University librarian John Dupuis and Barbara Fister from Inside Higher Ed point out that the obvious spam-like efforts documented by Beall and others distract us from the real problem: more underhanded and mainstream predatory practices employed by corporate publishers like Elsevier and Wiley.

Thus, as always and with any source, we recommend practicing what we preach to our students: think critically, evaluate, and verify. CUNY librarians Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella laid out the case for this more well-rounded approach, and both Grand Valley State University Library and the Directory of Open Access Journals have published comprehensive quality indicators to be used as part of a holistic review process. Authors can also enjoy all the advantages of open access while circumventing these concerns by opting for green OA, publishing their article in the journal of their choice and depositing a pre- or post-print copy in UW’s institutional repository, ResearchWorks.

Interested in publishing in a gold OA journal but hoping to avoid the pitfalls? Your subject librarians are here to help!

Understanding Your Author Rights, Part One

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After the years-long process of proposing the project, collecting the data, analyzing the data, and positing conclusions, you are finally ready to share your findings with the world. But do you know what rights you have to your work, both before, during, and after you submit your research for publication?

BEFORE

Even if you have yet to make your research public, it is protected under copyright. This gives you, the creator, the exclusive right to:

  • Distribute
  • Reproduce
  • perform and/or display publicly
  • and modify your work.

DURING

Once accepted for publication, most publishers require that you sign a Publication or Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA). Many journals use boilerplate CTAs that often ask authors to sign over their copyright wholesale. This is a problem if you hope to:

  • Use sections of or build off your research in later works;
  • Distribute copies of your article to colleagues or students; and/or
  • Upload your article to a personal or institutional website.

The good news: CTAs are negotiable, as publishers technically do not need the full copyright in order to legally publish your work. The publisher needs:

  • The non-exclusive right to publish, distribute, and receive financial return from your article;
  • To receive attribution as the journal of first publication; and
  • Permission to migrate your article to any future formats and include in collections.

With those rights granted, you retain:

  • The right to re-use and build on your work without restrictions;
  • The ability to increase access, shareability, and citations by sharing your work online; and
  • Your attribution and citation rights as the author.

A simple way to negotiate your rights is to fill out and attach the SPARC Author Addendum (http://www.sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/Access-Reuse_Addendum.pdf) to the CTA provided by your publisher.   Even if the publisher does not sign the addendum, publication of your article represents tacit acceptance of addendum terms.

It is also important to remember that many organizations providing grant funding also require certain types of access, archiving, and data sharing. You can easily check the requirements of major funding organizations by using SHERPA/JULIET, a UK-based database that is searchable by funder name or country of origin.

AFTER

Depending on the specifics of your CTA, you can archive a pre-print, post-print, or publisher’s version of your article in ResearchWorks, University of Washington’s online institutional repository. Doing so will increase access to and visibility of your work and provide you with a permanent, stable URL to your article.

If you need additional assistance, we’re here to help! Contact Sarah Leadley, leadley@uw.edu, with your questions.

References & Resources:

Open Access and Public Scholarship

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Open Access and Public Scholarship

Open access and public scholarship are often complementary approaches to engaged research, teaching, and practice. Next week for Open Access Week, the UW LIbraries is hosting two events highlighting the work of UW scholars who provide open access to their research and/or work in the area of public scholarship. Both events include UW Bothell faculty, and we are pleased to be able to offer streaming access on the Bothell campus. These events are part of the Libraries’ Hacking the Academy program series, a year-long conversation about digital scholarship.

Please join us in the Campus Library, room LB2-318, for live streaming of the following events:

Monday, October 24, 2016, 4:00-5:00 Hacking the Academy: Simpson Center for the Humanities 2016 Digital Humanities Summer Fellows Showcase Learn more about the Simpson Center Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship program and hear three 2016 Summer Fellows talk about their work.

  • Darren Byler (Anthropology) – The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia: A Repertoire of Uyghur and Han Migrant Popular Culture
  • Josephine Ensign (Psychosocial & Community Health) – Soul Stories: Health and Healing through Homelessness
  • Minda Martin (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell) – Seattle’s Freeway Revolt

Wednesday, October 26, 2016, 4:00-5:00 Hacking the Academy: Open in Action Celebrate Open Access Week by hearing how faculty on-campus are working to keep their work open. We’ll begin the program with some short talks followed by time for discussion around the theme “open in action.” Come ready to learn and share your ideas!

  • Rachel Arteaga, Assistant Program Director for Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics, Simpson Center for the Humanities, speaking on public scholarship
  • Steven Roberts, Kenneth K. Chew Endowed Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, speaking on open science
  • Dan Berger, Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at UW Bothell, speaking on public scholarship
  • Justin Marlowe, Endowed Professor of Public Finance and Civic Engagement, and Associate Dean for Executive Education Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, speaking on designing an open textbook

We’d also like to highlight some other UW Bothell open access and public scholarship projects, heading into Open Access Week. The Campus Library partners with UW Bothell faculty to develop a range of open access digital scholarship projects with connections to the community and engaged research. Some recent projects include the following:

Social Justice & Diversity Archive
Research and scholarship documenting the history and work of social justice organizations in the Pacific Northwest.
Faculty: Julie Shayne, Senior Lecturer, Faculty Coordinator, Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies
School of Interdisciplinary Studies, UW Bothell

Northwest Prison Archive (forthcoming) –
Interviews, documents, and new scholarship related to the carceral state in the Pacific Northwest
Faculty: Dan Berger, Assistant Professor, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, UW Bothell

Community Voices: Oral Histories at the University of Washington Bothell
Oral histories conducted by – and with – University of Washington Bothell students, staff, faculty, and community members, including histories of international students, students with disabilities, founders of UWave Radio, staff who maintain campus facilities
Faculty: Jill Freidberg, Lecturer, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, UW Bothell

Wetlands Collection
Documentation of the restoration, current use, and ongoing evolution of the UW Bothell/Cascadia College Wetlands
Faculty: Warren Gold, Associate Professor, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, UW Bothell

Please let us know if you would like more information about any of these projects, or would like to discuss your own open access/public scholarship with us.

See you next week in LB2-318!

 

 

Why Open Access?

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Why Open Access?

We engage and invest in research in order to encourage innovation and creativity, enrich education, and accelerate the pace of discovery.  Communication of the results of research is an essential component of the research process, and enabling broad, unfettered access to new knowledge plays a key role in ensuring that the scholarly publishing system supports the needs of scholars and the academic enterprise as a whole.

Yet because of cost barriers or use restrictions, research results are often not available to the full community of potential users.  The Internet gives us the opportunity to bring this information to a worldwide audience at virtually no marginal cost and allows us to use it in new, innovative ways. This has resulted in a new framework: Open Access.

What is open access and why does it matter?  Materials published in an open access journal or digital repository are available online to anyone anywhere for download and use without restrictions or payment by the user.  There are many benefits to a system of open access scholarship:

  • Research is more accessible and useable.
  • Articles published open access may be cited more and be more influential than those that have not.
  • Institutions that support research – from public and private research funders to higher education institutions – are implementing policies that encourage (and in some instances require) researchers to make research generated from their funding openly accessible to and fully useable by the public.
  • Researchers have access to scholarship regardless of institutional affiliation.
  • Students have access to scholarship after they graduate.
  • Scholarly conversations are advanced through broader participation.
  • Creative work and new discoveries are encouraged as scholars can build on open research.

OA at the UW: In April 2009, the UW Faculty Senate approved a Class C Resolution on Scholarly Publishing Alternatives and Authors’ Rights,  encouraging faculty to publish in “moderately priced journals, in journals published by professional societies and associations, or in peer-reviewed ‘open access’ journals,” and to archive their work in open access repositories.  In 2015 the Senate advanced this work via another resolution, Concerning the UW Open Access Repository & Request for Advice on an Open Access Policy, which requested that a UW Open Access Policy be drafted for review by the faculty. This work is ongoing, more on this to come!

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