Copyright policies of academic publishers

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This is a summary of the different copyright policies of academic publishers for books, book chapters, and journal articles.

Contents

Publishing models

Academic publishers fall broadly into two categories: subscription and open access, which take different approaches to copyright. [1]

Subscription publishers typically require transfer of copyright ownership from the authors to the publisher, with the publisher monetising articles behind paywalls. The final version of an article as copyedited and typeset by the publisher is typically called the version of record. Such publishers sometimes allow certain rights to their authors, including permission to reuse parts of the paper in the author's future work, to distribute a limited number of copies. In the print format, such copies are called reprints; in the electronic format, they are called postprints. [1]

Open access publishers allow authors to retain their copyright, but attach a reuse license to the work so that it can be hosted by the publisher and openly shared, reused and adapted. Such publishers are funded either by charging authors article processing fees (gold OA) or by subsidy from a larger organisation (diamond OA). [1]

Academic books and book chapters

Academic book publishing policies are not consolidated into a single database (in contrast to the SHERPA/RoMEO database of journal policies). [2] However, a relatively small number of academic book publishers dominate the market. Most publishers permit self-archiving of the postprint version of the author's own chapter (if contributed to only one chapter) or 10% of the total book (if contributed to multiple chapters). [3] The notable exception is Elsevier, which is the largest publisher to not permit chapter archiving under any circumstances. [4]

PublisherSelf-archivingVersionPermitted licenseEmbargo (months)Source
Bloomsbury Permitted [lower-alpha 1] Published All rights reserved [lower-alpha 2] 6 [5]
Cambridge University Press Permitted [lower-alpha 1] Postprint All rights reserved [lower-alpha 2] 6 [6]
De Gruyter Permitted [lower-alpha 1] Postprint12 [7]
Elsevier Author must email to request permission--- [8]
Emerald Permitted [lower-alpha 3] PostprintCC BY-NC0 [9]
Oxford University Press Permitted [lower-alpha 1] PostprintAll rights reserved [lower-alpha 2] 24 (HASS) or 12 (STEM) [10]
Routledge / Taylor & Francis Permitted [lower-alpha 1] Postprintno license restrictions18 (HASS) or 12 (STEM) [11]
SAGE (reference handbooks)Permitted [lower-alpha 1] Postprintno license restrictions24 [12]
SAGE (academic books, professional books, textbooks)Forbidden--- [12]
Springer Nature Permitted [lower-alpha 1] PostprintAll rights reserved [lower-alpha 2] 24 [13]
Wiley Author must email to request permission-All rights reserved [lower-alpha 2] - [14]
  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 author's own chapter (if contributed to only one chapter) or 10% of the total book (if contributed to multiple chapters)
  2. ↑ author's own chapter (if contributed to only one chapter) or full book (if contributed to multiple chapters)

Academic journals

Academic journal publishing policies focus on two main aspects: Whether a preprint article already openly shared can be submitted to a journal, and what version of the article can be subsequently openly shared after peer review has been concluded.

Typical publishing workflow for an academic journal article (preprint, postprint, and published) with open access sharing rights per SHERPA/RoMEO. Preprint postprint published.svg
Typical publishing workflow for an academic journal article (preprint, postprint, and published) with open access sharing rights per SHERPA/RoMEO.

Preprints

Academic publishers will not publish work that has already been published elsewhere, so a key issue has been the interpretation of a preprint server. Traditionally, academics have circulated pre-submission copies of their articles for informal feedback. However, open preprint servers since the 1990s increased the scale and visibility of this process and raised the question as to whether this constituted 'prior publication' or merely 'sharing'.

The majority of academic journal publishers now accept submission of articles that have already been shared as preprints, with copyright of this version remaining with the author by default. [15]

Postprints

The sharing of postprints (the last version of an article after peer review but before copyright is transferred to a publisher) has become increasingly permitted by academic journal publishers, typically after an embargo of 6-18 months. Journal policies are consolidated in the SHERPA/RoMEO database. [2]

Published articles

The copyright of the final published version of record may reside with the authors or the publisher depending on the publisher's business model. For journals following a subscription model, where articles are accessed via a paywall, copyright is transferred from author to publisher. Sharing of the final formatted article is therefore typically never permitted.

The rise of "gold" open access academic journals stands in contrast to this, where copyright is retained by the author and a reuse license (typically a creative commons variant) applied.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scientific journal</span> Periodical journal publishing scientific research

In academic publishing, scientific journal is a periodical publication designed to further the progress of science by disseminating new research findings to the scientific community. These journals serve as a platform for researchers, scholars, and scientists to share their latest discoveries, insights, and methodologies across a multitude of scientific disciplines. Unlike professional or trade magazines, scientific journals are characterized by their rigorous peer-review process, which aims to ensure the validity, reliability, and quality of the published content. With origins dating back to the 17th century, the publication of scientific journals has evolved significantly, playing a pivotal role in the advancement of scientific knowledge, fostering academic discourse, and facilitating collaboration within the scientific community.

arXiv Online archive of e-preprints

arXiv is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, mathematical finance and economics, which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are self-archived on the arXiv repository before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Some publishers also grant permission for authors to archive the peer-reviewed postprint. Begun on August 14, 1991, arXiv.org passed the half-million-article milestone on October 3, 2008, had hit a million by the end of 2014 and two million by the end of 2021. As of April 2021, the submission rate is about 16,000 articles per month.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Preprint</span> Academic paper prior to journal publication

In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before or after a paper is published in a journal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic publishing</span> Subfield of publishing distributing academic research and scholarship

Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

An article or piece is a written work published in a print or electronic medium, for the propagation of news, research results, academic analysis or debate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-archiving</span> Authorial deposit of documents to provide open access

Self-archiving is the act of depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as well as theses and book chapters, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact. The term green open access has become common in recent years, distinguishing this approach from gold open access, where the journal itself makes the articles publicly available without charge to the reader.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Postprint</span> Electronic version of a scholarly manuscript after peer review

A postprint is a digital draft of a research journal article after it has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, but before it has been typeset and formatted by the journal.

Libertas Academica (LA) is an open access academic journal publisher specializing in the biological sciences and clinical medicine. It was acquired by SAGE Publications in September 2016.

A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee to the publisher in order to publish an article open access, in addition to the continued payment of subscriptions to access all other content. Strictly speaking, the term "hybrid open-access journal" is incorrect, possibly misleading, as using the same logic such journals could also be called "hybrid subscription journals". Simply using the term "hybrid access journal" is accurate.

In academic publishing, an embargo is a period during which access to academic journals is not allowed to users who have not paid for access. The purpose of this is to ensure publishers have revenue to support their activities, although the impact of embargoes on publishers is hotly debated, with some studies finding no impact while publisher experience suggests otherwise. A 2012 survey of libraries by the Association of Learned, Professional, and Society Publishers on the likelihood of journal cancellations in cases where most of the content was made freely accessible after six months suggests there would be a major negative impact on subscriptions, but this result has been debated.

SHERPA is an organisation originally set up in 2002 to run and manage the SHERPA Project.

Eprints in Library and Information Science (E-LIS) is an international open access repository for academic papers in Library and Information Science (LIS). Over 12,000 papers have been archived to date. It is freely accessible, aligned with the Open Access (OA) movement and is a voluntary enterprise.

An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open access (1) by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional repository or disciplinary repository or (2) by publishing them in an open-access journal or both.

Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is a predatory academic publisher of open-access electronic journals, conference proceedings, and scientific anthologies that are considered to be of questionable quality. As of December 2014, it offered 244 English-language open-access journals in the areas of science, technology, business, economy, and medicine.

A copyright transfer agreement or copyright assignment agreement is an agreement that transfers the copyright for a work from the copyright owner to another party. This is one legal option for publishers and authors of books, magazines, movies, television shows, video games, and other commercial artistic works who want to include and use a work of a second creator: for example, a video game developer who wants to pay an artist to draw a boss to include in a game. Another option is to license the right to include and use the work, rather than transferring the copyright.

An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diamond open access</span> Open access distributed with no fees to author and reader

Diamond open access refers to academic texts published/distributed/preserved with no fees to either reader or author. Alternative labels include platinum open access, non-commercial open access, cooperative open access or, more recently, open access commons. While these terms were first coined in the 2000s and the 2010s, they have been retroactively applied to a variety of structures and forms of publishing, from subsidized university publishers to volunteer-run cooperatives that existed in prior decades.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Version of record</span> Official version of an article, published by a publisher

The version of record of an article is the fully copyedited, typeset and formatted copy of a manuscript as published, in contrast with earlier versions such as preprints and postprints. The terminology is used in a wide variety of written media.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Open Access & Copyright". Australasian Open Access Strategy Group. 2013-12-05. Retrieved 2021-01-27.
  2. 1 2 "About Sherpa Romeo version 2". v2.sherpa.ac.uk. Retrieved 2021-01-27.
  3. ↑ Kingsley, Danny (2015-04-23). "Making book chapters available in repositories". osc.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 2021-01-25.
  4. ↑ "Policies for Hosting Elsevier Articles". Elsevier. Archived from the original on Jan 31, 2021. Retrieved 2021-01-24.
  5. ↑ "Bloomsbury Open Access". Bloomsbury. Retrieved 2021-01-25.
  6. ↑ "Green open access policy". Cambridge Core. Retrieved 2021-01-25.
  7. ↑ "Repository Policy". De Gruyter. Retrieved 2021-01-25.
  8. ↑ "Open Access Books". Elsevier. Retrieved 2021-08-25.
  9. ↑ "Our open research policies | Emerald Publishing". www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com. Retrieved 2021-01-25.
  10. ↑ "Author reuse and self-archiving". Oxford Academic. Archived from the original on 2017-02-20. Retrieved 2021-01-24.
  11. ↑ "Routledge & CRC Press Open Access Books - Publishing OA Books - Chapters". Routledge. Retrieved 2021-01-24.
  12. 1 2 "SAGE Book Content Open Access Archiving Policy". SAGE Publications Australia. 2016-01-21. Retrieved 2021-01-25.
  13. ↑ "Self-Archiving Policy". Springer. Retrieved 2021-01-24.
  14. ↑ "Self-Archiving". Wiley Author Services. Retrieved 2021-01-24.
  15. ↑ McKenzie, Lindsay (16 June 2017). "Biologists debate how to license preprints". Nature News. doi: 10.1038/nature.2017.22161 . Archived from the original on Nov 21, 2020.
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