This paper is the second in a series of studies (see Gadd, E., C. Oppenheim, and S. Probets. RoMEO Studies 1: The impact of copyright ownership on author-self-archiving, Journal of Documentation 59 (3) 243-277) emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers the protection for research papers afforded by UK copyright law, and by e-journal licenses. It compares this with the protection required by academic authors for open-access research papers as discovered by the RoMEO academic author survey. The survey used the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) as a framework for collecting views from 542 academics as to the permissions, restrictions, and conditions they wanted to assert over their works. Responses from self-archivers and non-archivers are compared. Concludes that most academic authors are primarily interested in preserving their moral rights, and that the protection offered research papers by copyright law is way in excess of that required by most academics. It also raises concerns about the level of protection enforced by e-journal license agreements.

This is the final study in a series emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving) which investigated the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) issues relating to academic author self-archiving of research papers. It then describes the selection of an appropriate means of expressing those rights through metadata and the resulting choice of Creative Commons licenses. Finally it outlines proposals for communicating rights metadata via the Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

This paper is the fifth in a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It reports the results of two surveys of OAI Data Providers (DPs) and Service Providers (SPs) with regards to the rights issues they face. It finds that very few DPs have rights agreements with depositing authors and that there is no standard approach to the creation of rights metadata. This paper considers the rights protection afforded individual and collections of metadata records under UK Law and contrasts this with DP and SP's views on the right status of metadata and how they wish to protect it. The majority of DPs and SPs believe that a standard way of describing both the rights status of documents and of metadata would be useful. This article is an unrefereed preprint.

This paper is the third in a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers previous studies of the usage of electronic journal articles through a literature survey. It then reports on the results of a survey of 542 academic authors as to how they expected to use open-access research papers. This data is compared with results from the second of the RoMEO Studies series as to how academics wished to protect their open-access research papers. The ways in which academics expect to use open-access works (including activities, restrictions and conditions) are described. It concludes that academics-as-users do not expect to perform all the activities with open-access research papers that academics-as-authors would allow. Thus the rights metadata proposed by the RoMEO Project would appear to meet the usage requirements of most academics. This article has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science.

This is the first in a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving) which investigated the IPR issues relating to academic author self-archiving of research papers. It considers the claims for copyright ownership in research papers by universities, academics, and publishers by drawing on the literature, a survey of 542 academic authors and an analysis of 80 journal publisher copyright transfer agreements. This paper concludes that self-archiving is not best supported by copyright transfer to publishers. It recommends that universities assert their interest in copyright ownership in the long term, that academics retian rights in the short term, and that publishers consider new ways of protecting the value they add through journal publishing. This article has been published in the Journal of Documentation, 59 (3): 243-277.

This article is the fourth in a series of six emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open archiving). It describes an analysis of 80 scholarly journal publishers' copyright agreements with a particular view to their effect on author self-archiving. 90% of agreements asked for copyright transfer and 69% asked for it prior to refereeing the paper. 75% asked authors to warrant that their work had not been previously published although only two explicitly stated that they viewed self-archiving as prior publication. 28.5% of agreements provided authors with no usage rights over their own paper. Although 42.5% allowed self-archiving in some format, there was no consensus on the conditions under which self-archiving could take place. The article concludes that author-publisher copyright agreements should be reconsidered by a working party representing the needs of both parties. This article has been accepted for publication in Learned Publishing, 16 (4) October 2003.