0.8 Online hosting issues and options  (Page 9/11)

Even the online availability of all of a journal’s articles via self-archiving would not result in the inevitable loss of subscriptions. Most subscribers, both individual and institutional, will continue to demand the value added by online journals—in terms of convenience and speed of access, discovery and retrieval functionality, reference linking, personalization features, reliability, authenticity, and the other benefits a journal publisher or aggregator provides. Partly in recognition of this, many publishers have implemented policies that explicitly allow self-archiving. The SHERPA RoMEO service provides a list of publisher copyright and self-archiving policies. See (External Link) .

Article copyright

Some publishers argue that author transfer of copyright is essential to ensure the financial sustainability of journals, while some author-rights advocates assert that authors must retain copyright to protect their rights in the content they create, including the right to self-archive. If copyright is transferred to a society journal, the society typically holds the copyright, even if the society outsources publication to a third party, such as a university press or a commercial publisher. In practice, author rights and publisher business requirements can be protected through well-constructed author agreements, regardless of which party holds the copyright. For an example of a publishing license, see the Nature Publishing Group’s license to publish at (External Link) .

A principal argument for publishers holding copyright has been that it allows a publisher to protect a journal’s subscription and revenue base. In practice, a license to publish from an author—which grants a publisher an exclusive right to first publication and a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish, distribute, and sublicense—can afford such protection while allowing the author to retain copyright.

Some publishers also assert that holding copyright is necessary to effectively guard the author’s rights and manage permissions effectively. For many publishers who do not require the transfer of copyright, an author retaining copyright assumes responsibility for managing (or not managing) those rights. In practical terms, this can mean that a publisher may exclude the author’s article from online aggregations, pay-per-view offerings, and other permissions programs in which the publisher participates. In such cases, a society might elect to retain copyright, while allowing authors to retain liberal use and republishing rights. See Hill and Rossner (2008) for a brief account of how one small nonprofit academic publisher uses Creative Commons licenses to protect their publishing interests.

Insistence on copyright transfer appears to be decreasing, at least amongst small nonprofit publishers. According to one publisher survey, in 2003 over 80% of small publishers required authors to transfer copyright. By 2008, this figure had dropped to about 50%, with an additional 20% willing to accept a license to publish in the event an author was not willing to transfer copyright. Cox and Cox (2008), 75.