Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
providing an incentive for creativity and innovation.
There is a complicating factor in that there are differing policies from
publisher to publisher, and even from journal to journal within the same
publisher, with respect to the rights associated with particular pieces of
work and what the authors and other users can and cannot do with
different versions of an article. A study for the Publishing Research
Consortium found that authors greatly underestimate what they can do
with pre-publication versions of their articles but overestimate what
they can do with the Version of Record (Morris, 2009). Standardization
is difficult, due to the differing requirements of publishers and, more
importantly, the needs of authors, which vary greatly from discipline to
discipline.
However, far from being disassembled in our digital future,
copyright will continue to have an extremely important role to play, but
it does need to be constantly updated and supported by better
technology that makes it easier for users to know what they can do with
content that they find online. Clarity regarding the rights associated
with a piece of work is in everyone's interests in order to maximize the
opportunities afforded by the digital environment, and here initiatives
like ACAP (the Automated Content Access Protocol) and ONIX-PL
(ONline Information eXchange for Publications Licenses), which allow
for the digital expression of rights, will be important enabling
technologies, as metadata containing a machine-readable expression of
rights are a requirement.
8
Business models
Whether by subscriptions, author-side article charges, micropayments,
blanket licence fees, advertising revenue, charitable donation, collective
licensing or some new business model as yet unthought of, someone has
to pay for the stewardship of digital material and professional, high-
quality output. Otherwise, we face a chaotic web where we cannot tell
what is worth reading and what can safely be ignored.
What's the Big Deal?
The online availability of journals has already allowed publishers to
experiment with new business models. It is well known that, thanks to
