Librarians and their own open access publishing

Self-archiving by librarians

Open access initiatives useful to librarians and library and information science (LIS) faculty may include library-published, LIS-focused peer-reviewed open access journals, LIS subject repositories for author self-archiving of preprints and postprints, inclusion of work in institutional repositories, and integration of LIS open access journals in subject-focused indexes and abstracts. Of course, any definition of open access would take into account mounting articles on authors’ personal web pages, and development of open source software for libraries. There are many opportunities for new roles for librarians in the movement of the library toward open access.

By definition, self-archiving is ‘the practice of depositing one’s work in an OAI-compliant archive’ (Coleman and Roback, 2005) or the act of depositing ‘a digital document in a publicly accessible website, preferably an OAI-compliant Eprint archive’ (eprints, 2006). The actual process of depositing takes the researcher an average of ten minutes (Carr and Harnad, 2005). In many disciplines, self-archiving is not a common mode of sharing scholarship. For librarians, even though disciplinary archives exist, few librarians follow this behaviour. Even if librarians are not able to fully support a transition to open access journals at the present time, they can still support the concept of open access by self-archiving their work in one of the publicly accessible, OAI-compliant e-print subject repositories that are currently available to accept their deposited work. E-prints are defined as ‘digital texts of peer-reviewed research articles, before and after refereeing’ (eprints, 2006). Deposited work would usually be the author’s preprint (before peer review) or postprint (post peer review). Postprints are increasingly being called the ‘accepted version’ to distinguish them from the final branded publisher PDF. Using the term ‘accepted version’ denotes that the peer-review process is complete, thereby certifying the work. The article, if going on to traditional journal publication, has not yet been through final copyediting or branding by the publisher. This branded version is often held behind subscription barriers.

A librarian publishing a scholarly article in the traditional manner may only produce minimal research impact unless the article is widely acclaimed and cited, or published in a top journal with wide readership. Whether an article in a top journal, or a less visible peer-reviewed LIS article, self-archiving produces maximum impact for the author for all versions of the work. A common misconception may be that self-archiving somehow equals self-publication, evoking thoughts of the old vanity press. Acceptance for publication by a peer-reviewed journal is the characteristic that gives these works stature, and most would consider the refereed version to be the one that qualifies as the scholarly publication. Each publisher has its own rules for self-archiving of accepted articles, and this information is usually found on the journal’s website, or through a search of the SHERPA/RoMEO database. Library organisations or library research committees may want to follow the situation with LIS self-archiving, and market opportunities to interested librarians. Certain LIS publishers could be singled out for liberal archiving policies and this may be excellent public relations exposure if these companies seem to be responding to librarians regarding open access author permissions. Indeed, librarians might do more self-archiving of their own work were more information about the LIS journals available from an easy-to-access source. Librarians may wonder where this information about publisher and journal policies is pulled together in one convenient place for their discipline. Copyright transfer information is often buried, if available at all from many journals’ websites.

In all fields, authors have most likely found it difficult to understand their rights in terms of permissions and copyright. The SHERPA/RoMEO site now lists permissions information for potential authors in an easily searchable format. Librarians in their daily work are now able to show potential authors how to search SHERPA/RoMEO by publisher to get clarification of policies about the permission to self-archive work in repositories or on web pages. Unfortunately, many publishers are not included in this convenient tool and constant updating is necessary for currency. A 2004 publisher survey representing 7,169 journals in all fields reported that 49 per cent permitted publication of the manuscript or the finalised paper on an open access server (Bjork, 2004). Such wording generally refers to the preprint or any version of the postprint, for instance the author’s finalised word-processed or PDF document.

Times are changing in terms of publisher permissions, albeit slowly. In 2008, the RoMEO database reported that 65 per cent of publishers in all disciplines were allowing self-archiving of some kind (Morris, 2009a). A study by Cox and Cox reveals that 48–86 per cent of publishers already allow self-archiving of either the submitted or accepted versions, but only 5–19 per cent also allow deposit of the published version. There is also some evidence that some publishers may be moving to requiring an embargo on the accepted version even if they allow archiving of postprints (Cox and Cox, 2008; Morris, 2009a). RoMEO paints a less rosy picture of the situation for the branded publisher version, showing that in 2009 only 11.7 per cent of publishers allowed author use of the published version, with 4.2 per cent more after an embargo period, and a further 0.4 per cent after an embargo plus a fee (Morris, 2009a). Many researchers will want to put only the publisher’s branded PDF on the web (against most publishers’ policies), often due to the easy electronic dissemination of electronic journal articles. Researchers, including librarian authors, may want to have only one ‘final’ or ‘official’ version circulating online, and this may cause resistance to self-archiving other versions in repositories.

Librarians may wonder whether publishers are increasingly allowing authors to self-archive their scholarly work, and where. In another recent study by the Publishing Research Consortium, which analysed the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers’ ‘Scholarly publishing practices’ report, it was reported that 53 per cent of publishers, and 86 per cent by number of articles published, allow authors to ‘self-archive the submitted version to one or more of the following destinations: own or department website, institutional repository, or subject repository’ (Morris 2009a, 2009b). Sixty per cent of publishers and 90 per cent of the number of articles published allow this for the accepted version, while only 39 per cent of publishers and 10 per cent of articles allow deposit of the branded publisher PDF version. That said, ‘60 per cent of authors misunderstood the misleading term “postprint” and believe that they can always or sometimes self-archive the published PDF’ (Morris, 2009a). This study found that authors overestimated what they are allowed to do with the publisher-branded final version, and underestimated their rights concerning the ‘accepted’ or ‘postprint’ version. One half of authors thought that archiving the publisher’s version was allowable even though very few publishers actually allow this practice (Morris, 2009a). This highlights the steep learning curve for communities of academics, researchers, and even librarians when it comes to understanding what exactly constitutes green open access, that is, the self-archiving of research articles on the web. It has been well-publicised by Harnad and others that the idea of open access does not require changes to traditional journals, or even necessarily the need to start new journals, but just the practice of all authors of scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles to self-archive copies of their papers on the web for others to read.

When researchers learn the limitations that exist on the branded final article, they may then look to librarians for advice about depositing other versions, as well as how to cite such alternative versions of articles. Front-line librarians may worry about giving incorrect advice, especially as it relates to copyright, or the use and citing of multiple article versions. Researchers often have difficulty with constantly changing norms in citation style, and producers of style manuals as well as the online citation management tools have had to play ‘catch-up’ to remain current with the changes inherent in the new forms of online article publication. To complicate matters further, the various disciplines have decidedly different norms when it comes to scholarly communication, and the library may not have subject specialists or others adequately versed in disciplinary conventions to be able to advise faculty and students in matters of archiving. On the other hand, there is tremendous added value in a library whose librarians are able to be a source of credible information for authors and researchers in these matters.

Swan and Brown (2005) interviewed scholars from all disciplines who had not self-archived their work and found that library and...