This is a summary of the differentcopyright policies of academic publishers for books, book chapters, and journal articles.
Academic publishers fall broadly into two categories:subscription andopen access, which take different approaches to copyright.[1]
Subscription publishers typically require transfer of copyright ownership from the authors to the publisher, with the publisher monetising articles behind paywalls. The final version of an article as copyedited and typeset by the publisher is typically called theversion of record. Such publishers sometimes allow certain rights to their authors, including permission to reuse parts of the paper in the author's future work, to distribute a limited number of copies. In the print format, such copies are called reprints; in the electronic format, they are calledpostprints.[1]
Open access publishers allow authors to retain their copyright, but attach a reuse license to the work so that it can be hosted by the publisher and openly shared, reused and adapted. Such publishers are funded either by charging authorsarticle processing fees (gold OA) or by subsidy from a larger organisation (diamond OA).[1]
Academic book publishing policies are not consolidated into a single database (in contrast to theSHERPA/RoMEO database of journal policies).[2] However, a relatively small number of academic book publishers dominate the market. Most publishers permitself-archiving of thepostprint version of the author's own chapter (if contributed to only one chapter) or 10% of the total book (if contributed to multiple chapters).[3] The notable exception is Elsevier, which is the largest publisher to not permit chapter archiving under any circumstances.[4]
| Publisher | Self-archiving | Version | Permitted license | Embargo (months) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bloomsbury | Permitted[a] | Published | All rights reserved[b] | 6 | [5] |
| Cambridge University Press | Permitted[a] | Postprint | All rights reserved[b] | 6 | [6] |
| De Gruyter | Permitted[a] | Postprint | 12 | [7] | |
| Elsevier | Author must email to request permission | - | - | - | [8] |
| Emerald | Permitted[c] | Postprint | CC BY-NC | 0 | [9] |
| Oxford University Press | Permitted[a] | Postprint | All rights reserved[b] | 24 (HASS) or 12 (STEM) | [10] |
| Routledge / Taylor & Francis | Permitted[a] | Postprint | no license restrictions | 18 (HASS) or 12 (STEM) | [11] |
| SAGE (reference handbooks) | Permitted[a] | Postprint | no license restrictions | 24 | [12] |
| SAGE (academic books, professional books, textbooks) | Forbidden | - | - | - | [12] |
| Springer Nature | Permitted[a] | Postprint | All rights reserved[b] | 24 | [13] |
| Wiley | Author must email to request permission | - | All rights reserved[b] | - | [14] |
Academic journal publishing policies focus on two main aspects: Whether a preprint article already openly shared can be submitted to a journal, and what version of the article can be subsequently openly shared after peer review has been concluded.
Academic publishers will not publish work that has already been published elsewhere, so a key issue has been the interpretation of apreprint server. Traditionally, academics have circulatedpre-submission copies of their articles for informal feedback. However, open preprint servers since the 1990s increased the scale and visibility of this process and raised the question as to whether this constituted 'prior publication' or merely 'sharing'.
The majority of academic journal publishers now accept submission of articles that have already been shared as preprints, with copyright of this version remaining with the author by default.[15]
The sharing ofpostprints (the last version of an article after peer review but before copyright is transferred to a publisher) has become increasingly permitted by academic journal publishers, typically after anembargo of 6-18 months. Journal policies are consolidated in theSHERPA/RoMEO database.[2]
The copyright of the final publishedversion of record may reside with the authors or the publisher depending on the publisher's business model. For journals following a subscription model, where articles are accessed via a paywall, copyright is transferred from author to publisher. Sharing of the final formatted article is therefore typically never permitted.
The rise of"gold" open access academic journals stands in contrast to this, where copyright is retained by the author and a reuse license (typically acreative commons variant) applied.