Copyright can be a complicated issue.

Journals' Copyright Rules

There may be copyright restrictions in making an electronic print version of an article freely available. Although the majority of publisher and journals allow authors to archive their work in open access institutional repositories such as CORA under certain conditions, other publishers are more restrictive.

Typically, when an article is published, the author assigns copyright, or gives a copyright license to the publisher. Depending on the particular agreement that is signed, the author retains more or less rights to use the article. Some agreements forbid the author from photocopying the article, using it in teaching, or mounting it on-line. Other agreements are more liberal and allow the author to retain rights to use the article as they wish.

A UK based website SHERPA (www.sherpa.ac.uk) runs the RoMEO service, which lists publishers and their associated copyright agreements. Authors can use the RoMEO service to search for a publisher, or a particular journal, to see what rights are assigned to publishers and which are retained by the author. If a journal cannot be located on RoMEO, and this might be the case for smaller journals or IRIS h published journals, it is advisable to contact your publisher directly. Most publishers are now aware of Open Access repositories such as CORA or the national portal RIAN (www.rian.ie), and will have a statement relating to permissions on their website or as part of the agreement with the author. Further advice on copyright can be sought from the Library staff responsible for CORA by emailing cora@ucc.ie.

It is important that all authors familiarise themselves with the specifics of the agreements that they enter into with their publishers.

As stated above, the majority of publishers and journals allow authors to archive their work in open access institutional repositories such as CORA under certain conditions, other publishers are more restrictive. Authors can use the SHERPA RoMEO service to search for a publisher to see what rights are assigned to publishers and which are retained by the author. If a journal cannot be located on RoMEO, and this might be the case for smaller journals or IRIS h published journals, it is advisable to contact your publisher directly.

RoMEO uses a colour scheme to help highlight publisher's archiving policies. These colours differentiate between four categories of archiving rights:

ROMEO colour Archiving policy

 

Green	can archive pre-print and post-print or publisher's version/PDF
Blue	can archive post-print (ie final draft post-refereeing) or publisher's version/PDF
Yellow	can archive pre-print (ie pre-refereeing)
White	archiving not formally supported

 

Each publisher's entry is coded according to one of these colour categories. The entry for each publisher also lists conditions or restrictions imposed by the publisher which govern archiving rights or activities. Conditions are taken as terms which can be easily accommodated and which do not hinder an author in archiving their work. A typical condition is to acknowledge the publisher's copyright in the work. Restrictions are more prohibitive, typically requiring some additional action on behalf of the author. Where a restriction effectively blocks access to the electronic version, such as in the case of an embargo on its public release, or requiring password-controlled access, then the partial archiving right is noted but the full colour categorisation does not apply.

Sometimes open access discussions talk about "gold" publishers. This is a later development independent of RoMEO categories, and is used to describe publishers of open access journals. For the purposes of archiving, all open access journals allow archiving and can be taken as RoMEO "green".

Some of the larger publishers have different archiving rights for different journals. This is particularly the case where they publish learned society journals on behalf of the society. A learned society might insist on a more liberal, or more restrictive archiving policy than the general publisher's copyright agreement allows. The RoMEO colour coding relates to the overall permissions given by a publisher. For example, a publisher has to apply the "green" archiving rights across all of their journals for their code to be "green".

The terms pre-print and post-print are used to mean different things by different people. This can cause some confusion and ambiguity.

One usage of the term pre-print is to describe the first draft of the article, before peer-review, even before any contact with a publisher. This use is common amongst academics for whom the key modification of an article is the peer-review process. Another use of the term pre-print is for the finished article, reviewed and amended, ready and accepted for publication, but separate from the version that is type-set or formatted by the publisher. This use is more common amongst publishers, for whom the final and significant stage of modification to an article is the arrangement of the material for putting to print. Such diverse meanings can be confusing and can change the understanding of a copyright transfer agreement.

To try to clarify the situation, the RoMEO listing characterises pre-prints as being the version of the paper before peer review and post-prints as being the version of the paper after peer-review, with revisions having been made.

This means that in terms of content, post-prints are the article as published. However, in terms of appearance this might not be the same as the published article, as publishers often reserve for themselves their own arrangement of type-setting and formatting. Typically, this means that the author cannot use the publisher-generated .pdf file, but must make their own .pdf version for submission to a repository.

Having said that, some publishers insist that authors use the publisher-generated .pdf, seemingly because the publishers want their material to be seen as a professionally produced .pdf that fits with their own house-style.

The RoMEO listing tries to separate out the differing definitions and conditions implied by the use of the terms within each publisher's copyright transfer agreement and categorises the permissions and conditions accordingly. All information is correct to the best of their knowledge but should not be relied upon for legal advice. Again if you require additional advice please do contact library staff at cora@ucc.ie.

The submission process can take a few weeks as all of the submitted formats and permissions have to be checked by Library staff.

Open Access

CORA is a fully “Open Access” repository. This means that if an article is placed in CORA it can be freely accessed by anyone in the world using an internet connection. The potential readership of articles on CORA therefore is far, far greater than that for articles where the full-text is restricted to subscribers. Evidence shows that making research material Open Access increases the number of readers and significantly increases citations to the article - in some fields increasing citations by 300%.

It is important to point out that Open Access does not affect peer-review; articles are peer-reviewed and published in journals in the normal way. There is no suggestion that authors should use repositories instead of journals. Open Access repositories supplement and do not replace journals. Some authors have feared that wider availability will increase plagiarism: in fact, if anything, Open Access serves to reduce plagiarism. When material is freely available the chance that plagiarism is recognised and exposed is that much higher.

Journal price rises over the last decade mean that most universities can no longer afford subscriptions to all of the journals that their academics need. Even if a journal is available on-line, this does not mean it is freely available: university libraries pay large subscriptions to allow their academics to easily access journal materials on-line. Price rises that are many times the rate of inflation continue to be imposed each year, further restricting access to journal articles. The situation is even worse in the developing world, where journal subscription prices mean that many institutions simply cannot afford access to up-to-date research.

Open Access addresses these problems by taking the results of research that has already been paid for and making it freely available on-line, through repositories and websites. This process can have significant advantages for individual authors, for researchers, for institutions and for the process of research generally by freeing up the process of dissemination. Many funders have recognised that the job of research is only half-done if the results of that research cannot reach the widest audience. Some are formulating policies to require Open Access to their funded research.

Another aspect is that on a national level, most research is publicly funded and yet the general public cannot get access to the results that have been paid for by their taxes. For example, the majority of research paid for and carried out by the National Health Service is not freely available - even to NHS staff. Restricting access to research has many disadvantages. For instance, it means that there is often no readily accessible material available to science journalists or the public to counter the regular scare-stories or reputed miracle cures widely reported in the mass media.

 

As a recognised repository and portal, formally designated as a research output resource from an IRIS h academic institution, content uploaded to CORA will be mined much more successfully and rigorously by search engines such as Google (including Google Scholar), and by other recognised open access portals. The majority of searches for academic materials are conducted via Google – e.g. in excess of 65% of content on Rian, www.rian.ie, the IRIS h national research portal which is linked with CORA, was located by external researchers via Google since going live in July 2010.

The library will also incorporate specific metadata for your article on CORA which will again improve the chance of your research being found via Google and will therefore rank your material much higher in search results. In addition, all content available via CORA is branded as emanating from UCC, your individual college, department, school or research unit.

Finally, a number of research funders now have rules in place which make deposit in an open access repository a requirement of any grant. Other funders make a strong recommendation for deposit, or may make additional funds available for publication in an open access journal, or in one of the hybrid journals set up by some publishers. CORA also fulfils any of these funder mandates.

It is primarily the author who decides what gets uploaded to CORA subject to publishers permissions. It is highly advisable that all authors familiarise themselves with the specifics of the agreements that they enter into with their publishers.

Yes, this is the case at present. However, your material will be processed more quickly if you have taken some time to think about the copyright issues and permissions, and if you have selected the appropriate formats for your output onto CORA as permitted by your publisher.

A first step would be to carry out a search of the UK based website SHERPA (www.sherpa.ac.uk) which runs the RoMEO service, which listing publishers and their associated copyright agreements. If you cannot locate your publisher or journal here, then the next step will be to check the publisher’s website or copyright agreement. If you still cannot locate any information on your publisher’s position on open access, or if the issue is unclear, please contact library staff at cora@ucc.ie.