Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
publisher to the author. The rights falling to the author were carefully
specified and comprised mainly those allowing authors to use their
work in course packs, in the classroom or for future works, or to share
it with colleagues. Reuse in a wider sense or for a larger user group was
rarely permitted under these contracts. The rise of personal web pages
and institutional repositories led to adjustments in many publishers'
policies. Clauses were added to publishing contracts stating that the
work could be published on the author's home page, or that a pre-print
and later a post-print could be added to the repository of the author's
institution. The publishing contract is slowly changing from a transfer
of rights to a licence. In 2008 53% of the publishers still asked for a
transfer of rights; in 2003 this was 83% (Cox and Cox, 2008).
The response to licensing initiatives
In 2008, the SURF Foundation investigated whether the Licence to
Publish had been adopted by publishers (Beunen, 2007). The results of
the survey showed that a number of publishers did support the
underlying principles. Furthermore, the same number of publishers (16)
already have a repository policy in place which is compatible with the
underlying principles of the Licence to Publish. Moreover, seven
publishers conform to both aspects and thus they endorse all the
principles. Other publishers already used a licence, but not that
developed by SURF and JISC. The same group was found to have a
repository policy that accorded with the underlying principles of the
Licence to Publish.
The survey did not look into why publishers did not use the Licence
to Publish, although this is something that it would be interesting to
know.
A possible explanation is the presence of two specific clauses in the
Licence, concerning the version of the published article that is to be put
in the repository and the duration of the embargo. The Licence to
Publish asks for use of the PDF version produced by the publisher. This
was a deliberate choice during the development of the Licence, despite
the problems it might cause. Deciding on the PDF version
circumvented the problems that are caused by different versions of the
article and the different definitions of these versions that are used in
publishing contracts. The licence fixes the duration of the embargo at
