Michael Boock, Head of Digital Access Services

The open-access blogosphere was abuzz with accolades.

“Librarians have been at the vanguard of the open-access movement, often trying heroically, but in vain, to convince other faculty to deposit,” declared Stevan Harnad on his Open Access Archivangelism blog. “To the library faculty at Oregon State University, who have now put their own work where their heart (and hard work) is, kudos!”

The library’s bold move is an example of the “patchwork mandate” approach to policy change that has been gaining traction across America. Instead of waiting for whole universities to get on the green publishing bandwagon, many individual departments, laboratories and colleges are creating their own internal policies mandating deposits into their institution’s digital archive.

“The majority of mandates in the U.S. are departmental mandates,” observes Michael Boock, Head of digital access services for the Valley Library.

The OSU librarians modeled their policy after the one developed by Stanford University’s College of Education.
“We adopted Stanford’s approach of requiring deposit of the final published version of the article,” says Boock, who helped draft the policy guidelines. “Other mandates accept preprint versions, but we felt it was important to have the final published version. The formatting, tables and appendices give it weight and authority.”

It’s not surprising that OSU’s first open-access mandate originated in the library.

“The backbone of our profession is making research available to anyone who needs it,” says Boock. “Any barriers to access go against the core of what we’re about.”

~ Lee Sherman

ScholarsArchive@OSU is Oregon State University’s digital service for gathering, indexing, making available and storing the scholarly work of the Oregon State University community. It also includes materials from outside the institution in support of the university’s land, sun, sea and space grant missions and other research interests. Submitting your research to ScholarsArchive@OSU is easy. Just send us an email with your research attached, or we can arrange for you to submit it yourself. For this and other information contact scholarsarchive@oregonstate.edu.

You’re a committed eco-citizen. Your life is green from top to bottom—from the solar panels on your roof to the native plants in your yard. But what about your publisher? Is it green, too?

“Green” publishers are those that share their content far and wide without fetter, according to SHERPA RoMEO, a Web site that outlines journal publisher policies. Green publishers let authors put their articles into an electronic archive, post them on a personal Web site, or hand them out to students before and after peer review and formal publication.

Of the 600 publishers SHERPA RoMEO has rated, 60 percent allow limited self-archiving. Only 29 percent, however, qualify as truly “green.” Others are color-coded as blue, yellow and white, depending on the scope of openness.

Traversing the legalistic landscape of academic publishing can be dodgy. So OSU librarians have developed a workshop for OSU researchers who want to ensure broader electronic access to their scholarly writing. The workshop, called “Rights Well,” trains faculty and graduate students to retain more of their rights when negotiating contracts with academic publishers. Participants are surprised to learn that many so-called “copyright transfer agreements” can be finessed before signing.

“Author rights are one of the most overlooked aspects of publishing agreements,” said Andrea Wirth, OSU’s Geosciences and Environmental Sciences Librarian. “The workshop shows people how to really scrutinize the wording.”

Questions authors should ask themselves include: How might I want to reuse this article? Do I want to distribute it to students? What about depositing it in OSU’s electronic Scholars Archive, or putting it in a specialized archive within my discipline? Do I want to post it on my departmental Web site? How about my personal Web page? Do I want to link the article to my online vita? Maybe I’ll want to reuse the article as a book chapter down the road.

If an author answers yes to any or all of these questions, he or she has a couple of options: find a green publisher or work with a less-than-green publisher to get a greener contract.

Andrea Wirth

“Some publishers are very specific about the types of repositories where authors can place their work,” said Wirth. “For example, some allow submission to repositories—that is, institutional archives like OSU’s Scholars Archive, or to disciplinary archives for specific fields of study. You have to read the contract very, very carefully to make sure you don’t get surprised later.”

If a contract looks too restrictive, authors have options. An excellent tool is the SPARC Author Addendum, Wirth explains in the workshop.Developed by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an international organization dedicated to open access, the addendum gives authors a way to expand their contractual rights.

When Wirth recently ran into a contract problem herself, she used the addendum to good effect. Under initial contract wording for the journal Collection Management, she would have been unable to submit her article to the OSU Scholars Archive—a huge problem, because OSU librarians recently mandated that all library faculty-written articles be archived. So Wirth sent back the contract with an addendum. The publisher countered with a whole new contract.

“We went from an exclusive agreement, giving the publisher all rights, to a nonexclusive agreement, giving the publisher first-publication rights only,” she said. “Basically, the copyright reverts back to me.”

The academic publishing paradigm is shifting.

“Some publishers are reacting positively to the growing awareness about author rights and agreeing to modify contracts,” Wirth said. “Certainly, not all of them are there yet. But authors need to ask for what they want.”

The “Rights Well” workshop is available to faculty and graduate students by request. Contact Andrea Wirth at 541-737-9903 for information.

~Lee Sherman