Cornell's Copyright Advice: Guide for the Perplexed Self-Archiver

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SUMMARY: Cornell University's copyright advice pages are numerous and confusing because they cover everything -- from Cornell user rights for the use of other people's work to the negotiation of rights for Cornell authors' own work. One can give prospective self-archivers far more specific advice: The "Immediate Deposit, Optional Access" policy (ID/OA):

(1) Deposit all your final, peer-reviewed, accepted drafts (postprints) in your Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication.

(2) Set access to the postprint as Open Access immediately if it is published in one of the 69% of journals that are already green on postprint self-archiving.

(3) Otherwise provisionally set access to the postprint as Closed Access and notify the journal that you will set access as Open Access on [Date, one month from today] if you do not hear anything to the contrary.

(4) During any Closed Access interval, make sure your IR has the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button to handle any individual requests for a single email copy -- Fair Use -- from would-be users who see the postprint's openly accessible metadata: available for DSpace IRs and for EPrints IRs.

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Cornell University's copyright advice pages are numerous and confusing because they take a scatter-shot approach to everything -- from Cornell user rights for the use of other people's work to the negotiation of rights for Cornell authors' own work.

In all of this, it is next to impossible for a would-be self-archiving author to figure out what Cornell's legal experts advise regarding depositing their peer-reviewed articles in Cornell's Institutional Repository (IR).

(If anyone has managed to pinpoint Cornell's position on that, within that copious Cornell copyloquy, I would be grateful if they would excerpt it for us. Otherwise, all I find is advice that I should retain as many rights as possible, which is fine, but does not answer the question of a would-be self-archiver, trying to decide whether I have the right to self-archive this paper, now.)

Fortunately, the answer to that question is available even without having to find one's way through Cornell's cornucopia, and it is this (the "Immediate Deposit, Optional Access" policy, ID/OA).

(1) Deposit all your final, peer-reviewed, accepted drafts (postprints) in Cornell's IR immediately upon acceptance for publication.

(2) Set access to the postprint as Open Access immediately if it is published in one of the 69% of journals that are already green on postprint self-archiving.

(3) Otherwise provisionally set access to the postprint as Closed Access and notify the journal that you will set access as Open Access on [Date, one month from today] if you do not hear anything to the contrary.

(4) During any Closed Access interval, make sure Cornell's IR has the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST button to handle any individual requests for a single email copy -- Fair Use -- from would-be users who see the postprint's openly accessible metadata: available for DSpace IRs and for EPrints IRs.

Now go ahead and deposit, without any further hesitation, immediately. And negotiate copyright retention, or postprint-self-archiving rights whenever you can.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum