Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Open Access vs. Traditional Publishing


OA Policies and Traditional Publishing Agreements by Dr. Rumi Graham, Allan Bell and Mark Swartz
Lovett, Rathemacher & Boukari, 2017 “permissions based OA policies make it legal to post author manuscripts in the IR regardless of publisher policies”.

Harvard “Good Practices” website.  Their OA policy is permission based, or an author-rights policy which is a non-exclusive licence to publicly disseminate research between grantors (authors, departments), and grantee (institution).  The policy applies from that moment forward (prospective application, author gives a portion of rights are transferred to the institution and therefore cannot be completely transferred then to the publisher), so that the peer-reviewed manuscript version can be retained following the waiver (policy waiver for specific content).  This policy acknowledges the important of “Rights retention” in OA policies.

But do we have a reliable legal framework to protect these rights?

A legal option: 
A Rights Retention Open Access policy (RROA) is a non-exclusive agreement of an author or co-author while at the institution.  The policy grants the university a non-exclusive right to archive, preserve, reproduce and disseminate the work in any medium and authorize others to do the same.

No statutory provisions in Canada like US, UK or Australia.  Non-exclusive has no property rights in copyright, only contractual rights
  • there is no case law, just a legal analysis
  • a tonne of assumptions
  • extrapolating from the general principles of contract and property law and related to copyright
  • courts are unpredictable
We need a case or propose statutory provision(s).  Copyright librarians need to constantly educate and inform faculty about their past licence/copyright agreements and help them understand their options in the future (preventing the subsequent licence).  We need to protect all parties (faculty, institution, publisher).

No comments:

Post a Comment