CAUT Advises Scholars to Retain Copyright
The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has issued an Intellectual Property Advisory, advising scholars to retain their copyright, and providing advice as to how, including use of the SPARC Canadian Authors Addendum:
"Journals require only your permission to publish an article, not a wholesale transfer of the full copyright interest. To promote scholarly communication, autonomy, integrity and academic freedom, and education and research activities more generally, it is important for academic staff to retain copyright in their journal articles."
If an open access journal is not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals or the Journal Guide sites, there is a greater chance that the title might be published by a predatory publisher.
What are predatory open access publishers ? Jeffrey Beall, Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver in The Charleston Advisor v.11 no.4 April 2010 provides a succinct description and identifies some offenders:
"These publishers are predatory because their mission is not to promote, preserve, and make available scholarship; instead, their mission is to exploit the author-pays, Open-Access model for their own profit. They work by spamming e-mail lists, with calls for papers and invitations to serve on nominal editorial boards. If you subscribe to any professional e-mail lists, you likely have received some of these solicitations. Also, these publishers typically provide little or no peer-review. In fact, in most cases, their peer-review process is a facade. None of these publishers mentions digital preservation. Indeed, any of these publishers could disappear at a moment's notice, resulting in the loss of content ..."
University senates and faculty governing bodies are publicly encouraging faculty to publish in Open Access journals and become familiar with issues related to Open Access in their respective areas of expertise. The following are examples of such activity:
This policy outlines the principle of open access and provides guidelines for voluntary support of the principle by members of the Mount community. Approved by the Senate of Mount Saint Vincent University, October 25, 2010.
Senate Endorses Resolution on Open Access and Scholarly Communication
Faculty Senate Endorses Resolution on Open Access and Scholarly Communication
Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously approved a motion for finished academic papers to be posted for free online, in an open access repository, on an opt-out basis.
Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have voted to make their scholarly articles available to the public for free and open access on the Web.
Stanford University's School of Education now requires faculty members to allow the university to place their published articles in a free online database.
In addition, more than 100 U.S. university presidents and provosts have signed open letters indicating their support for the Federal Research Public Access Act, which proposes to mandate that all federally funded researchers make their research articles OA by self-archiving them within 6 months of publication.