RoMEO Studies 2: How Academics Want to Protect their Open-Access Research Papers

Abstract

This paper is the second in a series of studies (see E. Gadd, C. Oppenheim and S. Probets. RoMEO studies 1: the impact of copyright ownership on author-self-archiving, Journal of Documentation 59(3) (2003) 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 licences. 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. The paper 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 licence agreements.