[Moderator's Note: Below are two postings: (1) B. Hubbard (2) S. Arunachalam. My own comments on the redesigning of SHERPA/Romeo will follow in the next posting.]
Prior Amsci Topic Thread: "SHERPA will take over the Romeo Publisher Policy Table"ALPSPready Green http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3100.html (1) Bill Hubbard Dear Colleagues, This is to alert you to the new version of the RoMEO list of publisher's Copyright Transfer Agreements (CTAs), which is being hosted by the SHERPA project. see: www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php Two principles have guided the redesign: * The primary user-group of the list are those people who are archiving material and want to know details of the copyright transfer required by a publisher for the purposes of archiving an article. * The list attempts to clarify what conditions and rights form part of a publisher's CTA and so part of a contract between author and publisher. It might interest list members to know some of the changes that we have made to the original RoMEO list - a summary follows: * Changed from a scrolling list to a database solution. * Created the ability to search for a publisher. * A link to the publisher's home page has been provided from their name. * There is an on-line suggestion form for users to contribute corrections, updates and changes. * There is a similar on-line form for users to suggest new publishers. * The award and use of colours has been maintained, as colours have proved to be a useful "shorthand" in writing and in conversation about the general type of rights assigned or retained with the CTA of a publisher. * The original RoMEO colour-categories have been amended. The original list categorised a publisher as "blue" if pre-print archiving rights *or* if post-print archiving rights were permitted. We have removed this ambiguity by categorising pre-print "friendly" publishers as "yellow" and post-print "friendly" publishers as "blue". A publisher allowing both pre- and post-print archiving rights to be retained or assigned is is then made "green", as in the original RoMEO listing. * There are four main possible publisher policies and these are all materially different in terms of what can or cannot be self-archived. It is important we distinguish between each of them. The publisher might allow posting of pre-prints only - "yellow" The publisher might allow posting of post-prints only - "blue" The publisher might allow posting of both pre-and post-prints - "green" The publisher might allow none of the above - "white" * Clicking a colour in the colour-key shows the list of publishers in that category - all green publishers, or all white puiblishers, etc * Ticks, crosses and question marks have been used to give a clear summary on the rights granted as part of each publisher's CTA. * Conditions have been separated into different lines for clarity and categorised into "standard" conditions where possible. * Note that the conditions given reflect those laid out in each publisher's CTA. Some of these conditions are ambiguous or unclear. However, since these form part of a contract between the author and the publisher, these are listed as they stand. Authors may wish to negotiate exemptions or clarify interpretations before they put their name to documents with ambiguous terms. Advocates within an institution with a knowledge of their institutional policies might be of assistance to authors in interpretation of some of these ambiguous conditions. * In response to user-feedback, as in the original RoMEO list, statistics are available on the different colour-categories of each publisher. Note, however, that these statistics relate to only those publishers held by the list and the basis for comparison will change: for example, when further publishers are added at the suggestion of the user community. I hope that the archiving community finds the list useful. Bill Hubbard, SHERPA Project Manager www.sherpa.ac.uk ---- (2) Subbiah Arunachalam: Friends: "The Southampton group is negotiating with the SHERPA/Romeo Project with a view to doing exactly what Arun is suggesting!" says Stevan Harnad. I earnestly request people managing SHERPA and Romeo project to release such a list [of journals, rather than just publishers] in the public domain immediately, and certainly before 2 May 2004 when our workshop on Open Access will commence. Subbiah Arunachalam MS Swaminathan Institute, Chennai Trustee, Electronic Publishing Trust for Development