Copyright Transfer Agreements in an Interdisciplinary Repository

Abstract

Copyright Transfer Agreements (CTA) are a rich source of rights information related to self-archiving. According to the Eprints Self-Archiving FAQ, "To self-archive is to deposit a digital document in a publicly accessible website, preferably an OAI-compliant Eprint Archive." (1) This poster describes a study undertaken by DLIST whereby the CTAs of selected LIS journals were analyzed for publisher statements on the rights of authors related to self-archiving. The study differs from efforts such as the SHERPA/RoMEO database (2) that resulted from the large open access studies of Project RoMEO (3). The main differences are: 1) our focus on LIS journals and 2) focus on journals rather than publishers, since publishers appear to have different policies and CTAs for each of their journals. RoMEO/SHERPA focus on publishers in all disciplines and as such LIS is not fully/adequately represented. DLIST, Digital Library of Information Science and Technology is an Open Access Archive (OAA) for Library and Information Science and Technology based on E-prints; a cross-institutional disciplinary repository for the Information Sciences that focus on cultural heritage institutions such as Archives, Libraries, and Museums using interdisciplinary perspectives. To some researchers cultural heritage institutions and formal educational organizations are the critical information infrastructures for building the knowledge society.