News & Views item - January 2013

 

 

Public Funded Research Should be Open Access but To Do What With? (January 8, 2013)

Cameron Neylon is advocacy director at PLOS and in Nature 492, 348–349 (20 December 2012) he writes that "Open access must enable open use... Those wishing to maximize the benefits of public research must require more than free access — they must facilitate reuse".

 

Dr Neylon who earned his PhD in Chemistry from ANU, notes: "The Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence — a key component of the RCUK [Research Councils UK] and Wellcome policies on open access — allows any kind of reuse, provided the copyright holder is properly attributed. PLOS, where I work as advocacy director, has always used the CC BY licence, like other major open-access publishers, and this licence is emerging as a standard for open-access publications. The RCUK and Wellcome policies explicitly encourage researchers to submit their papers to journals that will publish the work under a CC BY licence — making these the first funders to take such a step."

 

Below we reprint the entire arXiv web page in regard to licensing. The take-home message, however, is the following:

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arXiv does not ask that copyright be transferred. However, we require sufficient rights to allow us to distribute submitted articles in perpetuity. In order to submit an article to arXiv, the submitter must either:

In the most common case authors have the right to grant these licenses because they hold copyright in their own work.

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According to Wikipedia on October 3, 2008, arXiv.org passed the half-million article milestone.The preprint archive turned 20 years old on August 14, 2011 and by 2012 the submission rate has grown to more than 7000 per month.

 

We submit that arXiv has provided a unique and near inestimable service in advancing the fields which have made marked use of its service and that toward the end of the decade, refereed journals whether open access (green or gold) or not will serve as instruments of record but will become of decreasing importance in furthering progress in research although continuing to influence a researcher's personal progress.

 

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arXiv License Information

arXiv is a repository for scholarly material, and perpetual access is necessary to maintain the scholarly record. As such, arXiv keeps a permanent record of every submission and replacement announced.

arXiv does not ask that copyright be transferred. However, we require sufficient rights to allow us to distribute submitted articles in perpetuity. In order to submit an article to arXiv, the submitter must either:

In the most common case authors have the right to grant these licenses because they hold copyright in their own work. We currently support only two of the Creative Commons licenses. If you wish to use another license then it is appropriate to indicate a more restrictive version for arXiv records (both of the licenses we support give us sufficient rights to distribute articles) and then indicate the more permissive license in the actual article.

Note that if you intend to submit, or have submitted, your article to a journal then you should verify that the license you intend to select does not conflict with the journal license or copyright transfer agreement. Many journal agreements permit submission to arXiv with the non-exclusive license to distribute which arXiv has used since 2004. The Creative Commons Attribution license in particular, permits commercial reuse and thus conflicts with many journal agreements.

 

Publisher PDFs, referee reports etc.

It is usually the case that PDFs found on publisher websites or supplied as proofs are the property of the publisher, which often owns the copyright and/or licenses their use. Even if the author retains copyright or permissions in the article, arXiv cannot accept PDFs that have been downloaded from a publisher's website unless arXiv has a blanket agreement with the publisher (it would be too costly in administrative time to track individual permissions). arXiv also cannot accept papers that contain material written by someone who has not authorized that content to be distributed on arXiv. This includes comments by referees (which may have separate copyright protection) and, of course, plagiarized material.

 

Licenses granted are irrevocable

Authors should take care to upload an article only if they are certain that they will not later wish to publish it in a journal that prohibits prior distribution on an e-print server. arXiv will not remove an announced article to comply with such a journal policy -- the license granted on submission is irrevocable. However, granting rights for arXiv to distribute an article does not preclude later copyright assignment. Thus, authors are free to publish submissions that already appear on arXiv even when the journal publisher requires copyright transfer. Please check the policies of any potential publication venue before uploading to arXiv. (For the policy information of many publishers, see the SHERPA/RoMEO site.)

 

Copyright notices

If you have permission from a publisher to upload content to arXiv provided that you include a special copyright statement with the paper, the correct place for that statement is the first page of the text of the submission. Copyright notices should not be included in the separate metadata and will be removed.

If you have any additional questions about arXiv's copyright and licensing policies, please contact the arXiv administrators directly.