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Who we arePractices for Self-Archiving Authors
Publishers' standard copyright transfer policies often contain rules limiting further reuse of the work by the authors. From the OA perspective the rights related to the works concern:
Preprint and postprint distribution rights
The terms pre-print and post-print are used to mean different things by different people. This can cause some confusion and ambiguity. The Sherpa-Romeo project classified the publishers in the following categories:
| ROMEO colour | Archiving policy |
|---|---|
| white | archiving not formally supported |
| yellow | can archive pre-print (ie pre-refereeing) |
| blue | can archive post-print (ie final draft post-refereeing) |
| green | can archive pre-print and post-print |
(click on the colour for the list of publishers)
Other rights (oral presentation, reuse of work, photocopying, republication ...)
All those rights can be individually or totally retained by the authors, it depends on the Copyright Transfer Policy of the publisher.
The current Best Practices for Self-Archiving following a discussion in the SPARC OA forum reported by Heather Morrison are:
- Haworth press policy authors retain as much of their rights as is consistent with ensuring Haworth has the rights it needs to publish
- Biomed Central policy permits the author to retain all the rights and in addition automatically deposit the paper in a OA repository
The ROMEO Project and SPARC has produced some documents to explain why and how authors should retain the rights on their work:
- Know your rights. One page handout encouraging authors to retain their rights and self-archive.
- How can I self-archive AND get my paper published? A table that helps you to see how you may both self-archive AND get your paper published, without breaking publishers’ Copyright Transfer Agreements.
- The author, the publisher, their copyright agreement and its terms. A powerpoint presentation reporting on the RoMEO analysis of journal publisher copyright agreements, and encouraging authors to retain rights and self-archive.
- SPARC Author's Addendum - Retain the rights you need