One of the problems of repositories at present is that everything is new. And much of it is complex. And some changes rapidly. So here is a simple idea, motivated by Dorothea’s reply to a post of mine…
[… why repositories need investment …]
And some of the work is automatable over time. Once you know a particular journal’s inclinations, pushing anything from that journal out of the bucket becomes a two-second decision instead of a ten-minute slog through SHERPA and publisher websites.
PMR: Now this is an area that is a vast time-sink. Suppose I (as a simple scientific author) want to know if I can archive my Springer article (read also Wiley, Elsevier, ACS, RSC…). What do I have to do? When?
I imagine that hundreds of people struggle through this every year. Frantically hacking through awful, yes awful, pages from publishers. Many of these are not aimed at helping authors self-archive but suggesting how they can pay money to the publisher for re-use of articles. (I could easily rack up a bill of 1000 USD for re-using my own article if I wanted to include it in a book, use it for distance education, use it for training etc.). It is not easy to find out how to self-archive – I wonder why?
So I thought I would try to do this responsibly and find out what Springer actually allows. I have a paper in a Springer journal – what am I allowed to do and when? The following journey may be inexact, and I’d appreciate correction, but it’s the one that a fairly intelligent, fairly knowledgeable, scientist who knows something about Open Access followed.
I went to the home page of J. Molecular Modeling and looked in “For authors and editors”. Nothing about self-archiving. A fair amount about Open Choice (the option where the author pays Springer 3000 USD to have their full-text article article visible (like all other current non-OpenChoice articles in J.Mol.Mod) and archived in Pubmed and re-useable for teaching without payment but with the copyright retained by Springer. I went to Google and typed “Springer self-archiving”. I won’t list all in detail but the results in order were:
A report by Peter Suber (2005), Journal of Gambling Studies, a critique by Stevan Harnad, a Springer PPT presentation (2004) on Open choice (which stated:
Springer supports Self-archiving: Authors are allowed to post their own version on their personal website or in their institution’s online repository, with a link to the publisher’s version. (PMR this is the ONLY page I found from Springer).
… an attack by Richard Zach on the 3000 USD for Open Choice, an attack by Stevan Harnad on why Jan Velterop opposes Green self-archiving, a page from Sherpa-Romeo which gives the conditions:
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeoupdate.php?id=74
and is the most helpful of all.
I immediately take away the fact that Springer is making no effort to help authors find the conditions for self-archiving. I have no idea where they are. I’d hate to do anything that violated the conditions.
So, to follow up Dorothea’s post. A LOT of useful human effort is wasted because the publishers make it so difficult to find out how to self-archive. I’d like a fair bargain. If the publisher has agreed that you can self-archive, tell us how. Or we start to see publishers as a difficulty to be overcome.
So a suggestion. Suppose each institutional repositarian spent 1 day a year posting how to self-archive articles from the Journal of Irreproducible Results. (Don’t be fooled – it takes a day to get a clear answer from most publishers or journals). And each one took a different journal. And posted it on a communal Wiki. Then we would have a clear up-to-date indication of what was allowed and what wasn’t. Including things like “I asked if I could retain copyright and they said yes”. Really vital info.
It’s not a lot of work per person. It would pay back within a year. Someone has to set up the Wiki. And keep it free of spam. But that’s not enormous. But sorry – I’m not volunteering. I’m in a discpline where there is very little chance of self-archiving legally. I’ve spent enough time trying.
I thought about this a year or so ago. I even started experimenting with wiki software. I’d be willing to run it… but it’s not going to work without the investment you mention, and that is a hard problem.
Imprimis, many repository “managers” (scare quotes used advisedly) are part-timers who had the repository loaded on to an existing full-time job. These people are not clued into the zeitgeist. A lot of them don’t even know about SHERPA.
Secundus, a lot of us have “better safe than sorry” imprinted on our brains by management and by the general culture of risk aversion in librarianship, and so if SHERPA doesn’t have the answer, we don’t investigate any further.
Tertius, there aren’t obvious places to get out the word on something like this. We have no journal. The only conference dedicated to us, Open Repositories, travels more than we can afford to. We have no online gathering-place (and if we did, how many of us would know about it? see point the first). And nobody’s leading. I’ve tried. I failed.
Quartus, it’s been tried on a disciplinary basis in law. The results were not outstanding.
I really will do this if someone convinces me there’s a snowball’s chance in Hades of it actually accomplishing something. Thus far, not convinced.
I am a repository manager and spend a lot of time writing to publishers on behalf of my authors. Every response I get from them I forward to Jane Smith at Sherpa/romeo. She always says thanks. I don’t know what she does with it all, but certainly they are the ones best positioned to centralise and publicise publisher info.
I don’t bother to check publisher websites for self-archiving policies; I look on romeo for journal articles, and write to publishers (using sherpa’s template) requesting individual permissions for other types of material. Lots and lots of journals aren’t on romeo; I don’t deposit articles from those journals.
I’ve never met another repository manager who hasn’t heard of sherpa.
–Stephanie
(2) Thanks Stephanie.
I can only point to what Dorothea says. It’s possible there is a difference across the Atlantic – perhaps SHERPA is less well-known.