Friends: People often ask the question "We have surrendered the copyright to the journal publisher. How can we archive our papers?" There is no need to surrender copyright to work one has performed to a journal publisher. One can always negotiate with the publishers. Now alternative contracts are readily available. Please see the following excerpt. Regards. Arun -------- Hirtle, Peter B. Author Addenda: An Examination of Five Alternatives D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 12 No. 11, November 2006 Extracts: "Until recently, the primary method that authors could use to retain some rights in their writings was to rewrite the contract with the publishers themselves. Thanks to the development of standardized author addenda, the task has become much simpler. An author's addendum is a standardized legal instrument that modifies the publisher's agreement and allows the author to keep key rights." ... "Three different organizations MIT , Science Commons (through its Scholar's Copyright project), and SPARC have worked with lawyers to develop self-sufficient addenda that address these issues. These addenda can be attached to the publishing contracts received by publishers and are likely to be legally binding." Recommendation "While not perfect, author addenda can be an important tool that authors can use to retain the rights they want or that their employing institutions request that they retain. They can be an important component in ensuring open access to articles from either an institutional or a subject repository. The Scholar's Copyright addenda can also provide legal protection to authors who have contributed preprints to such repositories and then do not notice that the contract they sign with the publisher asks them to guarantee that the publisher will be able to exercise exclusive rights in the work. "Of the addenda analyzed, the Scholar's Copyright OpenAccess-CreativeCommons 1.0 Addendum, provides the greatest benefit to authors. In the absence of data on acceptance by publishers, authors may wish to submit it to the publishers along with the publisher's copyright transfer agreement." Comment: Peter Suber made reference to author addenda, most of which are analysed here, in his comments on the SURF-JISC Licence to Publish. In view of Hirtle's conclusion on the "absence of data on acceptance by publishers", another of Suber's remarks applies, that authors publishing in Romeo-green journals do not need to negotiate a different agreement, thus keeping it simpler than using new and untested legal constructs. ___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger - NEW crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com