Developing IPR solutions for academic author self-archiving

This paper describes the work of the UK JISC-funded RoMEO (Rights Metadata for open archiving) project. It reports on a survey of 542 academic authors and an analysis of 80 journal publishers’ copyright transfer agreements, and how they have informed the development of some simple rights metadata by which academics can protect their research papers in an open access environment. It also reports on a survey of 22 OAI Data Providers and 13 OAI Service Providers, and how the results have informed the development of a “metadata protection solution” that describes the conditions of use of freely available metadata.