An open letter to the Fellows of INSA and IASc. Dear Fellows of INSA and IASc: Recently, the Librarian of the Raman Research Institute, B'lore, wrote to a publishers seeking permission to deposit the full texts of research papers published in some of their journals by Prof. C V Raman decades ago in an institutional repository RRI is creating. The publisher refused permission! Refused permission for uploading papers written several decades ago. When we requested the publisher again and also publicised the incident through many electronic discussion groups, the publisher gave permission to RRI to upload those papers. Of course, the publisher had the legal right to deny permission as Prof. C V Raman must have signed a copyright transfer agreement with restrictive clauses (as most of us continue to do even now). Here is a quote from J F Sollenberger and M Shipley, The state of scientific publishing: problems and promise, Scand J Public Health, 2004; 32: 153156: "Librarians and many scientists suggest that authors propose alternative wording in publication agreements, specifically retaining the right to use their publications in subsequent works or in their teaching, and/or to self-archive their works in institutional repositories. Author control over the work is then partially preserved, even though the right of first distribution still belongs to the publisher." The authors need not even take the trouble to compose the text of a revised agreement. A few alternative versions are readily avaialble. Here is another excerpt from the same article: "Publishers have what is effectively a monopoly over the distribution of scientific research, since authors hand over copyright and libraries have little choice but to subscribe to the journal. Authors who want to use the results of their own research in future publications, even a figure or a table, must ask for permission to do so, unless they had negotiated this right in the original publication agreement. If not previously arranged, faculty also must request the right to include copies of their own papers in their course syllabi. The traditional model of publishing forces institutions to buy back results of research that they (or taxpayers) have paid for already. Publishers are in control!" Come to think of it. If most Indian researchers perform research with financial support from taxpayers' money (salaries and research grants from DST, DBT, CSIR, UGC, ICAR, ICMR, DAE, DoS, DOD, universities and lab facilities created with funds from a government source), how can they surrender the copyright to their work to a journal publisher? No research paper written by a scientist on the payroll of the US Governmnt (NASA, NIH labs, etc.) is copyrightable. We should pass such a law in India. Till then, our funding agencies and the government SHOULD DEMAND that no author signs away the right to archive and reuse the content of a research paper to a journal publisher - Indian or foreign. Of course, the authors (and their institutions) should have the freedom to choose the journal where they want to publish their papers. As of today, more than 92% of about 9,000 journals surveyed allow authors to archive their papers in their own institution's OA repositories, either immediately or within a few months of publication in the journal. The authors can and should negotiate with publishers of other journals and amend the copyright agreement form before signing it. The funding agency which supported the resaerch in the first palce and the authors who actually did the work and wrote the paper have a greater right on the paper than the publisher. Regards. Subbiah Arunachalam Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com