On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > Do authors who publish in an American Physical Society journal and sign the > APS copyright transfer agreement have the legal right to post the > APS-formatted versions of their articles on their own or their department's > Web servers if these servers are OIA compliant?
> http://forms.aps.org/author/copytrnsfr.asc: > (4) The right to post and update the Article on e-print servers as long as > files prepared and/or formatted by APS or its vendors are not used for that > purpose. Any such posting made or updated after acceptance of the Article > for publication shall include a link to the online abstract in the APS > journal or to the entry page of the journal. I expect that Marty Blume, Arthur Smith or Mark Doyle will be replying for APS. I just want to suggest that the APS policy as stated above is eminently reasonable, and I, for one, would consider cause of open access and the research community abundantly well-served if all journal publishers were to adopt the above policy as their model. (1) It explicitly allows both the pre-refereeing preprint and the post-refereeing postprint to be self-archived by the author/institution. This is all the BOAI self-archiving FAQ asks of publishers: "What can publishers do to facilitate self-archiving? " http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publishers-do (2) It requires a link to the publisher's proprietary version. (A very reasonable thing to have, for scholarly and authentication purposes.) (3) It does not allow the publisher's PDF page-images themselves to be self-archived: This is a slight inconventience, but it has an advantage too: It helps in the unbundling of essential and optional products/services that will be necessary in order to produce a stable, viable cost-recovery model in the open access era. For as long as there continues to be a market for the publisher's enhanced PDF, with its add-ons, the essential costs of peer review will continue to be covered the old way (by subscriptions/licenses from the reader-institutions that still wish to continue buying them). If/when there is no longer a market for the publisher's enhanced PDF, it will no longer be produced and sold, and the essential peer-review costs that turn the preprint into the postprint and certify the outcome can be paid for on the author-institution-end, per paper, out of the windfall savings on the prior costs of the optional reader-institution-end product. Amen. Stevan Harnad