JQ Johnson, 18 April 2009
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Resolved, that the UO Library Faculty adopts the following policy in support of deposit of scholarly works in Scholars' Bank:
The Library Faculty of the University of Oregon are committed to disseminating the fruits of their research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy:
Each Library faculty member gives to the University of Oregon nonexclusive permission to use and make available that author's scholarly articles for the purpose of open dissemination. Specifically, each Library faculty member grants a Creative Commons "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States" license to each of his or her scholarly articles. The license will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Library Faculty except for any articles accepted for publication before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean of the Libraries will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs the UO of the reason.
To facilitate distribution of the scholarly articles, as of the date of publication, each faculty member will make available an electronic copy of the author's final version of the article and full citation at no charge to a designated representative of the Libraries in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the Libraries. After publication, the University of Oregon Libraries will make the scholarly article available to the public in the UO's institutional repository.
This resolution was passed unopposed at the May 7, 2009 meeting of the library faculty.
The basic goal of this resolution is to make it easier for UO Library faculty to deposit their work in Scholars' Bank, our institutional repository. And that in turn is important because it makes our scholarship more widely available to the public in the short term, and more likely to be preserved in the long term.
The resolution implies that library authors would (a) grant to the library the minimum rights they need to deposit their work in Scholars Bank and allow the library to distribute it, and (b) would have the obligation to provide the library with a copy of their work. In the few cases where either was problematic, there would be an easy escape clause allowing the author to be excused from the policy.
Definitely. We'll be leaders, but not pioneers breaking totally new ground. The resolution closely mirrors similar ones passed by Harvard (3 schools), MIT, the Stanford Ed School, and the Oregon State U Library Faculty. For a list of all institutions that have repository mandates – more than 70 in all -- and their particular policies, see http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
As a nonexclusive license, the permission granted to the UO would not restrict the rights of other licensees or your rights as the author. For example, the author could still sign away copyright ownership in her or his work to a commercial publisher, who could then make copies, sell the work, create derivative works, etc. The permission granted to the Libraries, since it occurred before the copyright transfer, would not be overridden by the later transfer, so the Libraries could continue to distributed the work through Scholars' Bank. The additional permission granted to the Libraries is very narrow, and is essentially just the permission needed for Scholars' Bank:
- it requires that if the library makes copies it preserve attribution and integrity
- it requires that the library not make copies of the work for any commercial purposes
- it allows the library to make copies and publicly display or perform them, but does not allow the library to make derivative works such as translations or collections.
The resolution doesn't prevent the author from granting additional usage rights. For example, suppose the library author had written a playscript. The author could decide to allow the university to create a video (a "derivative work") from it. Similarly, if the author's publisher is willing, the author could deposit a copy of the publisher's formatted version of the article in Scholars' Bank.
All library faculty members who write scholarly articles while they are a member of the faculty.
The resolution applies only to "scholarly articles," written or co-authored by UO Library faculty. That basically means articles submitted to peer-reviewed journals. It doesn't say anything about books, conference papers, or any other types of work. But there's nothing that would prevent library authors from also depositing other works such as conference papers in Scholars Bank if they wished. The reason we single out articles is that the real point of this is to have faculty give the UO a non-exclusive license BEFORE they sign away all rights to a publisher, but in such a way (as a mandate) that they minimize the risk that the publisher will object.
It applies to all works whether or not the UO would consider them Òworks made for hire.Ó So don't try to weasel out by claiming you wrote it on the weekends or that the paper topic had nothing to do with libraries. J
Most journals do insist that your work not be already published, but that's not an issue here.
First and most importantly, it won't appear in Scholars' Bank until after it is published in the journal, unless you specifically authorize the library to make it available earlier.
Second, depositing an article in a repository isn't really publication. Some journals may object and reject an article that has already appeared in a repository, while others will not. It's pretty common for authors to circulate preprints of an article for comment, or to submit to a journal an article that is substantially similar to a conference paper, but most journals don't object to that, and shouldn't object to having a preprint of the paper made available in an institutional repository, either.
You're probably going to transfer the copyright of your article to the publisher, which means that the publisher will have full rights and you'll have none left unless the contract grants you some. But that doesn't really matter. Copyright law has provisions for how to deal with a situation where you've granted conflicting rights to two people, just as contract law does. With contracts the first usually takes precedence. With copyright law, 17 USC 205 (d) and (e) specifically, a prior nonexclusive grant like this one takes precedence in most cases. In a few cases the nonexclusive grant needs to be in writing, so we'll ask you to sign an acknowledgement of this policy as part of the library personnel process.
Note that the only thing this grant does is gives the UO and the public the right to distribute your preprint. Assuming a typical copyright agreement, the publisher will still have the exclusive right to distribute the publisher's formatted final version, to create derivative works, etc.
Not usually. A few publication contracts might require it, but they are very rare. If the contract includes a warranty that you the "seller" sign and that says you haven't already given away any rights, you'd probably want to cross that out and/or include an addendum. But my belief is that normally you're completely within your rights to first offer some nonexclusive usage rights and then later sign away your copyright ownership. Note that if you have given even a single copy of your work to a colleague to read you have limited the copyright transfer slightly, since based on first sale that colleague has the right to transfer her copy to someone else -- but no publisher ever cares.
If you do decide you need to notify the journal, be sure to say that your employer requires this, since that increases your bargaining power.
This is a compromise. For sure authors want a single canonical version, so it would be great to deposit a copy of the PDF produced by the publisher. However, most publishers are strongly opposed to this, argue that they have added their own copyrightable expression in producing the published version and that they need to retain control over that version in order to make any money, and deny you permission to deposit the final version.
If your publisher's policies allow it, though, of course it's great to have the published version available in the institutional repository, either instead of or in addition to the author's final vesion.
Not at all. The resolution applies only to peer-reviewed "scholarly articles." These are the sorts of work that most academics write so that they will be widely read, rather so that they can earn royalties on them. It does not apply to authors' non-giveaway texts (largely books), nor to artistic works such as musical compositions or paintings. If there is a particular work that qualifies but which an author expects to commercialize, he or she can request an exemption from the policy for that work. The goal of the resolution is ensuring that authors get the maximum benefit from works such as journal articles by making sure they are as widely read as possible.
Yes. Readers will have open access to the Scholars' Bank version of the work, though they may for some purposes still want to reference the commercial version made available by the publisher. It's complementary to publishing in an open access journal.
The resolution's use of a standard Creative Commons license reflects a change that we are presently working on in Scholars' Bank; Scholars' Bank currently requires that anyone submitting to it sign a license, but that license is (as of April 2009) one that was developed locally and isn't necessarily as tightly crafted as we'd like. We're considering switching Scholars' Bank to using Creative Commons licenses for all deposits. The Creative Commons organization has emerged as the most highly respected source of legally well-crafted license terms for people who want to make their work widely available. If you are interested in the details of the particular Creative Commons license, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/
There are several alternative Creative Commons licenses. This one is the least inclusive, granting only the rights that are really essential for anything that could be considered "open access." Several people have argued that the license should grant additional rights to the public, for example the right to create derivative works (remixing) or the right to use your works for commercial purposes without further permission. Some library authors may wish to grant such additional rights to the public, but others may want to retain them.
Lots of places on the web. Here are a few:
Open Archives Initiative, http://www.openarchives.org/
Swan, A. (2005). Open access self-archiving: An introduction. Retrieved 16 April 2009, from http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/
ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies) [website]. Available at www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/. (Last accessed 16 April 2009; includes a list of all known IR deposit mandates and details about their policies.)