Roderick B. Salisbury (TEA Editor)
EAA members might be interested in SHERPA RoMEO,
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/, a searchable online database of Publisher copyright and self-archiving policies. Most researchers share their publications freely with colleagues, and provide publications to students via electronic teaching aides such as Moodle and Blackboard. This use, however, is not necessarily legal, and can cause inconvenience, at best. RoMEO provides open access policies for publishers from around the world, with self-archiving permissions and conditions of rights given to authors summarized on a journal-by-journal basis.
The current situation in academic publishing, sharing, and open access is complex, and steadily becoming more byzantine. Funding bodies are increasingly requiring either Open Access publications, or open access archiving of both data and publications. Most researchers are aware that making their research widely available online increases both visibility and the number of citations. Publisher policies vary from complete acceptance of archiving to embargo periods to prohibition of any archiving except pre-print. In addition, the vast majority of publishers ask for copyright agreements to transfer the right for intellectual labor from the author to the corporation. In these cases, you the researcher and author are not free to use your work except under specific exceptions and fair use clauses. Therefore, we encourage all members to protect yourselves by identifying the rights and penalties that publishers claim in relation to your research and results.
By transferring copyright in a publishing agreement, you might lose all or any of the followings rights:
- to distribute an article freely to colleagues
- to self-archive on a website, including your own personal site
- to archive in an institutional repository
- to reproduce copies of an article for teaching purposes
- to reuse an article as a chapter in a book
- to revise or adapt an article and re-publish it
According to the website, RoMEO is a Jisc service (formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee; a not-for-profit that provides digital technologies and resources in support of research and higher education) with collaborative relationships with many international partners, who contribute time and effort to developing and maintaining the service. Of particular importance for EAA Members are that entries contain specific details about journal articles and book chapters, including which version an author can upload to an archive, where it can be archived, and what, if any, conditions are attached to archiving (e.g., how long the embargo period is). The database is updated continuously.
As argued previously in
TEA 51, EAA members, and indeed all archaeologists and heritage professionals, need to get involved in debates about Open Access publishing, data storage, etc. To do this, we need to be informed, and RoMEO provides a platform to help us educate ourselves, as well as protect ourselves from being ignorant of the legal requirements of the copyright agreements we sign. In addition, members may want to check the
Directory of Open Access Journals to identify opportunities for OA publishing in peer-reviewed journals without paying for publisher “Gold” schemes.
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