Surf Foundation Publisher Policy Survey

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2008 22:37:20 +0000

The Surf Foundation http://www.surffoundation.nl/ has released
a survey on "Acceptance of the JISC/SURF Licence to Publish &
accompanying Principles by traditional publishers of journals":
http://www.surffoundation.nl/download/LtP-final-report-dec07.pdf

The gist of the survey result is that more and more publishers are
moving toward explicitly endorsing author open-access self-archiving,
and that the majority already endorse it.

This is good to know, but it was already evident from the EPrint
Romeo statistics (derived by clarifying the SHERPA-Romeo data, and
presenting it at the individual journal level). These statistics
have been available and regularly updated for several years now:
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php

Two comments:

(1) The Surf Foundation survey obscures the results somewhat, because it
uses the needlessly profligate, irrelevant and confusing colour codes
of SHERPA-Romeo ("green", "blue", "yellow", "white") when all we need
to know is:

    GREEN (62%) (journal endorses immediate open-access self-archiving of
the
    peer-reviewed postprint)

    PALE-GREEN (29%) (journal endorses only unrefereed preprint
    self-archiving)

    OTHER (9%) (journal does not endorse immediate self-archiving, of either
    preprint or postprint, embargoes self-archiving, or charges author
    money to do it)

(2) There is some confusion about what is meant by "open access" in the
Surf report (whether gold Open Access journal publishing, Green Open
Access author self-archiving, or the adoption of the JISC/SURF license
recommendation).

For articles in journals that endorse immediate author self-archiving
of the postprint (62%) there is no need for the JISC/SURF license. It
is always welcome, but not necessary for open access.

Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/

UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
    http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
    BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
    http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
    BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
    a suitable one exists.
    http://www.doaj.org/
AND
    in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
    in your own institutional repository.
    http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
    http://archives.eprints.org/
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Received on Tue Mar 04 2008 - 22:46:03 GMT

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