There was an interesting post on LIBLICENSE-L yesterday, apparently many authors are unaware of their rights with publishers. The authors tend to believe the publishers' agreements are a lot more restrictive than they really are. Publishers' agreements are more liberal than authors are aware of, but the agreements do not allow self archiving of the published PDF.
According to series of reports (listed at the end of this post) the majority of publishers' agreements allow authors of the articles to provide copies to colleagues, to incorporate them into their own works, to post them to a personal or departmental website or to an institutional repository, and to use them in course packs. Yet many authors don't think they can do any of these things when if fact many are allowed to do so.
The PDF is what people and authors want. Again, publishers' agreements exceeded author expectations regarding the PDF and copies to colleagues, incorporation into their own works, and usage in course packs. However, many authors (more than half) think publishers' agreements allow them to deposit the final PDF for self archiving. In reality less than 10% of publishers allow this.
So why is there such poor understanding of the agreements among authors? The PRC concludes that publishers need to do much more to clarify the terms of their agreements. However PRC also believes that certain terminology like "preprint" may be misleading to authors and the term should be dropped for the standard NISO terminology.

• Full report: Sally Morris, Journal Authors' Rights:perception and reality (PRC Summary Paper 5), PRC 2009 (PDF) http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/JournalAuthorsRights.pdf
• Summary of findings: Journal Authors' Rights: perception and reality - a preliminary report, PRC 2009 (PPT) http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/SummaryforAPE-final.ppt
• Author survey summary: Author Rights Copyright Project, GfK Business 2008 (PPT) http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/PRC2008v2.ppt
• John & Laura Cox, Publishing Practice 3, ALPSP 2008(PDF) http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?id=200
• Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group, NISO l 2008 (PDF) http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/RP-8-2008.pdf

So why are publishers' agreements as clear as mud to most authors? I decided to look at Elsevier's Authors Home. (I picked Elsevier because they were the first publisher who came to mind.) I clicked on Authors' Rights, then "What rights do I retain as an author?" A lot of the information about what an author can and can't do is stated pretty clearly. I agree it gets a little confusing regarding "pre-print" version and "the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article." But, for the most part the authors' rights are stated fairly clearly. This makes me wonder whether authors even read these agreements? And perhaps the reason for poor understanding of their rights is a result of the authors' failure to read the agreements in the first place.

When we travel by plane we all hear the flight attendant giving the safety demonstration. How many well traveled passengers tune out thinking they know everything? How many published authors tune out when it comes to their rights?

Labels: Publishing Industry