IPR issues facing open access

The UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project is investigating the IPR issues related to the ‘selfarchiving’ of research papers by academics and the subsequent disclosure and harvesting of metadata about those research papers using the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). During the first phase of the project we performed online questionnaire surveys of four key stakeholder groups: academic authors, journal publishers, OAI Data Providers and Service Providers. We have also performed a very interesting analysis of 80 journal publishers’ Author Copyright Agreements. The principle outcomes of the project are, firstly, the development of some simple rights metadata by which academics might protect their research papers in an open access environment, and secondly, a means of protecting the rights in all that freely available metadata that may soon be available.