Friends, It is a bad policy to surrender copyright to one's research papers to journal publishers. Please inform researchers - faculty and students and other scientific and technical staff - and administrators (Vice Chancellors, Directors, Principals, Deans, Heads of Departments, etc.) in your institutions that they could retain copyright to the papers they publish. Prof. Peter Suber of Harvard University recommends the Berkman Klein Center's Guide to good practices for university OA policies, which focuses on the rights-retention approach. Please visit http://bit.ly/goodoa . This guide, written and edited byPeter Suber and Stuart Shieber in consultation with many OA experts, is based on the type of rights-retention OA policy first adopted at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and the University of Kansas. Policies of this kind have since been adopted at a wide variety of institutions https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Additional_resources#Policies_of_the_kind_rec... in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia, for example, at public and private institutions, large and small institutions, affluent and indigent institutions, research universities and liberal arts colleges, and at whole universities, schools within universities, and departments within schools. Can a journal reject a paper if the author wants to retain copyright? Says Prof. Peter Suber, "As far as I know, no publisher has ever rejected a submission just because it was covered by a Harvard-style rights-retention OA policy. There are at least 85 universities in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia with these kinds of rights-retention policies." The Guide is endorsed by many international organizations involved in scholarly communication, but by NONE so far from India. Indeed, it would be great if funding agencies such as DST, DBT, CSIR, UGC, ICAR, and ICMR and Academies such as INSA, IASc, NASI, NAAS, INAE, etc. endorse this Guide and make it widely known to individual researchers and institutions they support. Best wishes. Arun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658 http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-9925-2009 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.