Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
well known. The collections, during their compilation, caused both the
biggest and the smallest of problems. Resolution of the biggest problem
- getting permission from the copyright owner (usually the publisher)
to include the work in and make it accessible through the repository -
was greatly facilitated by three factors: the output of only a relatively
small group of scholars was concerned, in several cases copyright was
still owned by the authors and, in addition, the publishers were
favourably disposed towards the project.
The scholarly output that has been stored in repositories so far
consists mainly of articles published in scientific journals. This may
change in the future because of the increasing addition of research data.
In virtually all cases, the rights to the articles have been transferred to
publishers.
The RoMEO project
Requesting and acquiring permission from copyright owners for every
article is a time-consuming process. In the UK, this has led to a
different practical approach: the RoMEO project (Rights MEtadata for
Open archiving). This project investigated the rights issues surrounding
the self-archiving of research in the UK scholarly community. By
surveying the academic community it ascertained how research
literature and metadata was used and how it should be protected. From
this work, the RoMEO project created a list of publishers' conditions for
self-archiving. The RoMEO project is now part of SHERPA (Securing a
Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) and is a
point of reference for the copyright policies of English-language
scientific journals, in particular, with a few national additions
(SHERPA, 2006). The SHERPA/RoMEO service lists publishers' copy-
right conditions regarding authors archiving their work online,
categorizing publishers and their conditions into four classes, using the
colours green, blue, yellow and white to indicate the permissions that
are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer
agreement. Each publisher's default policy on the author's right of self-
archiving is listed.
