Copyrights! Licensing! Academic Publishing!

So, our latest project with Fafnir has been retrofitting our new layout and design to our two 2018 issues (i.e., the issues since Laura and I joined the team); part of the job has entailed creating a new -- and the first -- cover design, front matter, plus a Table of Contents template.

 In addition, I've taken on the self-appointed task of registering Fafnir with the Directory of Open Access Journals in the hopes of raising our academic street cred and visibility.

 Well, the process has been eye-opening.

 First off, all due credit to the people who originally founded Fafnir, who prepared much of the information being directly required by the DOAJ. That makes things radically simpler. As I'm going through their lengthy application, though, I'm discovering that there's so many things I had no clue could be a part of academic publishing, especially for open access journals. 

 For example:
  • The name of our platform or hosting service. (Our what?)
  • any software/spiders crawling through our website. (Spiders? Like Shelob?)
  • Download statistics. (I knew things like this existed, but no idea how to access them for Fafnir.)
  • A plagiarism policy and checker (which, while seemingly obvious, I never imagined necessary for an academic journal).
  • A Deposit Policy Directory (only a vague idea what this is). Also not yet sure if this is the same or different from a digital archive independent from our publisher (something we don't have yet).
So, many of these things I've only just now learned about, thanks to the DOAJ applications, and realized would be necessary and helpful. And that doesn't include all the professional organizations besides DOAJ that I realized are available in support for academic journals.
  • Council of Editors of Learned Journals
  • The Keeper's Registry (for digital archive information, although this is about to close)
  • Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
  • SHERPA/RoMEO
 However, the only thing absolutely confounding me at the moment is the language for copyright and licensing. Apparently, Fafnir already has Creative Commons licensing, although I had to troll through several websites looking for  the machine-readable licensing information. But I'm also starting to suspect that our CC licensing is contradicting Fafnir's retention of the copyright for academic articles -- apparently, "best practice" is that copyright remains with the author, but our original editors were obviously concerned that authors might someday decide to abrogate our open access policy somehow. So, that's the current debate. In the meantime, I've learned more about licensing, pre-print & post-print rights, and whatever else than I ever wanted  to know.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony . And even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, I guarantee you'll never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two dis
Read more

Thoughts upon Reading Tolkien's New & Expanded LETTERS

So, I'm reading through the newly expanded version of Tolkien's Letters. One thing I hadn't properly realized is that these letters were part of Carpenter's original manuscript back in 1981, but Carpenter had to cut them due to cost. Turns out that Carpenter had a pretty keen eye on what could bear cutting -- most of this new stuff isn't terribly interesting, but I discovered a few nuggets. VINDICATED!! (Me, sorta) Naturally, whenever you read new primary material, your first instinct is to check to see if anything contradicts something you've said in print ... especially biographically. Well, I've made three big "biographical" claims, and here's my sigh of relief: Concerning my claim that, in 1954, Tolkien and colleagues contrived to create CS Lewis's academic chair at Cambridge in exchange for them nominating EM Forster for the Nobel Prize. Nothing in  Letters  supports or contradicts this. In my recent article for  Notes & Queries ,
Read more

Uncovering CS Lewis's First Religious Poem

 So, with my article's official acceptance by the journal English Text Construction , it's time to let the cat out of the bag. Using a combination of metrical analysis and biography, I've ascertained with near perfect certainty the first religious poem C. S. Lewis poem ever wrote .... a short poem, "Sweet Desire," that scholars have never previously paid any attention to. This poem is firmly datable to early 1930, probably January or February is my guess, and given the poem's subject matter, it's clearly talking about CSL's fears and intellectual trepidation about becoming a theist and abandoning atheism for good. It's basically Lewis's version of Caedmon's Hymn . The full metrical details will have to await my article, but one interesting caveat on my claims to firstness. In my peer reviewer's commentary, they recommended I contact a CSL scholar named  Charlie W. Starr, who's been working on Lewis's handwriting for quite a lon
Read more