Publisher views to access are changing

Traditional academic publishers are changing their attitudes to copyright and the deposit of articles in a publicly-accessible repository. This is the result of an inquiry among a group of 47 traditional (non open-access) publishers by SURFfoundation.

The study asked publishers if they support the principles formulated by SURFfoundation and JISC, regarding publishing an article in a traditional journal. The conclusion is that more and more traditional publishers support some or all of these principles or are looking into changes in their current policies. The main characteristics of the principles are:

· The author retains copyright of his/her work, while granting the publisher the rights needed to publish the work
· The author may freely deposit the article in a research repository, with an embargo before public release of maximum six months.

One third of the publishers in the study already have a repository policy which is compatible with these principles and the same amount of publishers use a licence to publish instead of copyright transfer.

Wim Liebrand, director of SURFfoundation said: ‘This is a promising development. With the balanced approach JISC and SURF started, we attempted to bridge the gap between the traditional publishers and the Open Access movement. We hope many publishers will follow.’