Why would a commercial publisher allow the deposit of research in an Open Access repository for which it owns the copyright?
A. The Open Access movement represents the academic community taking back control of their intellectual output from publishers and ever since the concept was first mooted by Stevan Harnad in 1994 there has been a growing body of advocates and lobbyists who have been successful in raising the profile of OA at national and international level. Publishers are increasingly adopting a formal position on “self-archiving” (the practice whereby an author makes an article freely available in an Open Acees repository) and the University of Nottingham SHERPA project maintains the RoMEO database which gives a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement.
