Balancing rights

Pushing the boundaries for Open Access while maintaining good relationships with publishers can be a tricky balancing act.

Organisations are constantly negotiating on a global scale to ensure a 'balance of rights' between stakeholders concerned with scholarly communication - the Statement of Principle published by the Research Information Network is a good example of this, describing how to take advantage of new technologies to move practice forward while recognising publishers' concerns.

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) aims to "correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system" and has produced a briefing paper on how to change copyright transfer agreements - http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/SPARC_AuthorRights2006.pdf

The Copyright Toolbox produced by JISC and the SURF Foundation states that rights "need to be managed in a way that respects the interests of both author and publisher", in keeping with the Zwolle Principles.

The RCUK, in its position statement supporting open access, also acknowledges the need for both authors and publishers to respect this balance: "Full implementation of these requirements must be undertaken such that current copyright and licensing policies, for example embargo periods or provisions limiting the use of deposited content to non-commercial purposes, are respected by authors. The research councils' position is based on the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies."

We encourage our researchers to take full advantage of the benefits of making their research outputs available in Research@StAndrews:FullText, while respecting the current scholarly publishing framework.

UK alliance backs Open Access

The Wellcome Trust has announced the formation of the UK Open Access Implementation Group to " coordinate evidence, policies, systems, advice and guidance, to make open access an easy choice for authors and one that benefits all universities."

The high level group is chaired by Martin Hall, Vice Chancellor at the University of Salford who spoke at the recent Future of Research conference, and includes senior members of RLUK, the UK Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust. They aim to drive debate and maximise the impact of UK research.

Practical steps for implementing Open Access

Anyone interested in finding out what they can do in a practical way to achieve Open Access to research outputs will find the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook a valuable tool.

The site provides relevant and current information for researchers, funders, publishers, librarians, students, policy-makers... in fact anyone who has an interest in the possibilities offered by OA.

One of the latest resources to be added is a brief guide to Copyright and authors' rights which describes actions that academic authors can take. See lots more on the benefits for research dissemination including topics such as Open Access Repositories and Citation impact.

Wellcome Trust Open Access funding

We have just completed our return to Wellcome detailing how our Open Access award was spent last year, and we have been notified of continued funding to support our researchers pay Open Access publishing costs.

The library has also introduced new procedures to manage this fund, and details have been circulated to Wellcome Trust grant recipients. You can find out more on our web pages.

The Wellcome Trust website provides useful Author FAQ and a summary of publisher policies to help you decide where to publish.

The UK PubMed Central blog has an interesting analysis of journals that have published Wellcome-funded research.