RoMEO Studies I: The impact of copyright ownership on academic author self-archiving

Gadd, Elizabeth and Oppenheim, Charles and Probets, Steve (2003) RoMEO Studies I: The impact of copyright ownership on academic author self-archiving.

Abstract

This is the first in a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving) which investigated the IPR issues relating to academic author self-archiving of research papers. It considers the claims for copyright ownership in research papers by universities, academics, and publishers by drawing on the literature, a survey of 542 academic authors and an analysis of 80 journal publisher copyright transfer agreements. This paper concludes that self-archiving is not best supported by copyright transfer to publishers. It recommends that universities assert their interest in copyright ownership in the long term, that academics retian rights in the short term, and that publishers consider new ways of protecting the value they add through journal publishing. This article has been published in the Journal of Documentation, 59 (3): 243-277.