A slowly melting glacier

The melting glacier that is open access seems to be thawing a little, according to a research report released last week. Writes Peter Williams

SURF is a Dutch-based collaborative organisation for higher education institutions and research institutes aimed at breakthrough innovations in ICT. Its SURFfoundation has examined the copyright policies of traditional academic publishers. A group of forty seven traditional publishers, who do not currently allow Open Access, were assessed. The result: publishers are increasingly interested in allowing the depositing of articles into a publicly accessible repository.

The study asked publishers if they supported principles formulated by SURFfoundation and JISC, regarding publishing in traditional journals. The conclusion was that a growing number of traditional publishers support some, if not all, of the current open access repository principles. Furthermore, many of these publishers were said to be looking into changing their current policies to encourage an environment of sharing academic materials.

These principles attempt to clarify and balance the relationship between the rights of authors and publishers, to enable a wider access to scholarly literature, which in turn would make journals compliant with a growing number of funder requirements.

The main characteristics of the principles are that authors retains copyright of their work, while granting the publisher the required rights to publish the work, and that authors are entitled to freely deposit their work in a research repository with an embargo before public release, for a maximum of six months.

One third of the publishers in the study have developed a repository policy which is compatible with these principles and, the study reports, a similar proportion of publishers currently use a licence to publish instead of copyright transfer. In addition to having drafted principles, JISC and the SURFfoundation have also created a model Licence to Publish.

This initiative is an interesting attempted to bridge the gap between the traditional publishers and the Open Access movement. How successful it will be remains to be seen.