Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, has been running a Library & Information Science Author Rights pilot scheme that allows authors to post their peer-reviewed Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) to an institutional repository immediately after publication. The two year pilot scheme, first introduced in 2011, has now been extended for at least a further year to enable Routledge to consider alternative approaches to copyright and to find sustainable ways of extending author rights.
As part of the pilot, a survey was conducted by Routledge to canvas opinions on the Library & Information Science Author Rights initiative and also investigated author and researcher behaviour and views on author rights policies, embargos and posting work to repositories. The survey, eliciting over 500 responses, offers a fascinating insight into the current thinking of authors & researchers globally across the discipline of Library & Information Science. Having the option to upload their work to a repository directly after publication is very important to these authors: more than 2/3 of respondents rated the ability to upload their work to repositories at 8, 9, or 10 out of 10, with the vast majority saying they feel strongly that authors should have this right.
The implementation of the author rights pilot saw the number of respondents who would recommend Routledge as a publishing outlet increase by 34% while the average willingness to publish with Routledge on a scale of 1 to 10 increased from 6.6 to 8.3. The shift in response from Library and Information Science professionals towards Routledge’s publishing program before and after the launch of this initiative practically demonstrates the enthusiasm for immediate upload of non-embargoed content within the library community. Routledge is dedicated to developing publishing models that suit the needs of the Library & Information Science community.
Tracy Roberts, Editorial Director comments “It is clear that the ability to upload articles to a repository directly after publication is a key concern for LIS authors. We are delighted to announce that we have now extended this pilot to the end of 2014 supporting research within this discipline, as well as affording us additional time to monitor the effects of this pilot study.”
