Commons copyright targets scientists

Common touch for scientific authors keen to share their information

Authors can hold onto their copyright more easily with the release of new online tools.

Science Commons, a project by copyright body Creative Commons , has got together with the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (Sparc) to draft amendments to copyright agreements that will make it easier for authors to retain rights, including the right to reuse their articles and to post them in repositories.

“This is about authors’ rights,” said John Wilbanks, vice-president of Science Commons . “Right now, authors trade the most important rights – like the right to make copies of their own scholarly works – to traditional publishers. That trade has led to an imbalanced world of restricted access to knowledge, skyrocketing journal prices, and an inability to apply new technologies to the scholarly canon of knowledge.”

He told IWR that there had been little publisher response to the announcement. “So far it has been pretty quiet from publishers, which is not surprising. There is not a lot of interest in making it clear that you don’t want authors to have the right to make copies of their own work.”

The Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine allows authors to choose from four addenda which will generate amendments to a publisher’s copyright agreement to give authors the right to reuse their own work.

The addenda can be downloaded from the Science Commons, Sparc, MIT and Carnegie Mellon University websites, and will be freely available to other institutions that wish to host it.

Science Commons and Sparc have also combined two existing addenda into a new one called Access-Reuse. The addendum is intended to ensure that authors can also grant to others a non-exclusive licence to reuse their content.

Science Commons will also offer two other addenda, Immediate Access and Delayed Access, representing alternative arrangements that authors can choose.

http://sciencecommons.org