This display exhibits The Hidden Costs of Doing Research: how much would it cost to access all the sources referenced in just one journal article? It uses Dr. Alexandra Gillespie’s recent article, “Are The Canterbury Tales a Book?” (2018) published by Taylor & Francis.
The References section at the end of the article includes 87 sources – 57 books, 22 journal articles, 3 digital library websites, 2 magazines, 1 dissertation, and 1 report – cited in this paper, which you can see surrounding Gillespie’s article. Just for the References section, the total cost is over 5,975.26 CAD (calculated on Oct. 28. 2019). This is the cost that she would have needed to pay if she had not been affiliated with the University. Last week using this display with a contest, I encouraged students to think about the hidden costs of doing research.
Using the same display, which will remain in MN 3230 until Nov. 11th, I would like to draw your/researchers’ attention particularly to yellow and red tags, which make us think of copyright and author’s rights. Please see the online version below.
Red Tags: From many users’ perspective, OA/public domain/freely available could appear the same because they are free to read. However, from authors’ perspectives, these terms have different meanings and implications.
- Open Access: Authors retain the copyright, a bundle of rights.
- Public Domain(*): Authors are no longer the copyright holders. According to the Creative Commons license of Public Domain, interestingly or disappointingly, users do not need to give attribution to Public Domain work.
- Freely Available: A clear indication of Open Access and/or a note about any commercial use can be missing even though they are freely available to read and download. It is not also clear how long it will freely be available. More importantly, the information about the author’s rights is missing, and it is likely that the publishers have the copyright.
Yellow Tags:
- Books with yellow tags are now in limbo. The Yellow Tags raise some issues. X years after the publication, a copy of a book became out of print and the publisher is not interested in publishing it in both print and electronic formats. The book might cost more, and, in some cases used copies are only available. Yet, because it is still available commercially and because the publisher holds the copyright, neither libraries nor the author(s) would not be able to make his/her copy freely available until this work comes into the Public Domain(*). Access to this type of book is very limited unless your library has it. Moreover, when instructors want to use it as a reading material for their students, their libraries might need to pay transactional fees to the publisher.
- Would it be possible to negotiate some of your rights with publishers? For example, I wish we could have a clause like this: when this book becomes out of print and the publisher no longer publishes copies, the author and libraries can have reproduction rights.
*Public Domain: Under the Copyright Act of Canada, duration is determined by the life of the author, not by the life of the owner of copyright. Even though an author transfers their copyright and assigns the rights in their work to a publisher or another person, the duration of copyright is still calculated based on the life of the author. Under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the minimum duration of copyright protection in the U.S., Canada and Mexico will be life-plus-seventy.
Since faculty are both producers and consumers of academic publications, open access publishing is one of the options to retain your rights; however, I understand that this can be complicated and that article processing fees (APC) are too expensive to pay. I would like to share some suggestions with you:
If you need help negotiating with publishers, want to publish on TSpace, or have other questions about open access, please contact me, and I will be happy to meet with you and answer your questions.
Warm regards,
Yayo Umetsubo, Scholarly Communications and Liaison Librarian
Email: yayo.umetsubo@utoronto.ca
3. References
- Reviewing your rights: Publishers may allow you to keep some ownership of your work by jointly own the rights. Please review the publishing agreement to ensure you have some important rights.
- Negotiation matters: If the publisher’s terms are not favourable to you, please contact me for more information about how I can support your negotiation with publishers.
- Checking APC discounts: Journals often charge an APC to offset the costs of open access publication. U of T Libraries have negotiated discounts with some publishers to make this (a little bit) easier: visit our APC Discounts page for more information.
- Publishing on TSpace: We can help you make your research openly accessible (Green Open Access) in TSpace, U of T’s research repository. See an example at: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/96186 Many publishers will allow you to publish a post-print version (Accepted Manuscript) of your work after an embargo, and it is a great way to comply with the Tri-Agency (SSHRC/NSCERC/CIHR) funding open access requirements.