Expanding publishing impact

Publishing choices: Know your rights and expand your impact!
April 25, 2007
UNC Health Sciences Library, Chapel Hill, NC
Guest speaker: Heather Joseph, Director, SPARC
Panelists: Sarah Michalak (moderator), Deborah Gerhardt, Julia Cleaver, Brad Hemminger

• Open Access (OA) should be understood as a vision, not a specific model
• Goal of OA is to lift barriers to both access and use
• In paper world, distribution was a value added service of journal publishers; not so in digital world
• Of great value to researchers is OA's advantage in research impact: wider audience=more impact
• OA not only about seeing and reading, but about using articles/research in new ways
• Number of OA journals (in DOAJ) rose 25% in 2006!
• When launching an institutional repository, must consider what an OA repository means for the campus community, institution...
• Copyright is "showered" on authors as they write and is theirs alone until they sign it away
• $19billion publishing industry in 2006
• Dissemination is becoming understood as an essential, inseparable process of research
• Copyright is a default in our government; even without filing for official registration, authors have very strong rights/protections, including the right to make derivatives
• T. Brody, Southampton Univ., has shown that self-archiving positively increases citation impact (50-250%)
• "You don't ask, you don't get": authors need to think about how they might want to use their work in the future and tell publishers upfront
• Although UNC (and several other institutions) created an institutional author addendum for authors to attach when signing publishing contracts to only share non-exclusive copy right with publishers, there is a risk that if the market is flooded with too many variations, publishers will reject them en masse, simply because it is too much work sifting through them all; a better route will likely be to either stipulate upfront what rights the author wishes to retain, or to use generic addendum such as that provided by SPARC or the Science Commons Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine