JASIS pushing to liberalize author agreements

The Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS) is pushing Wiley to liberalize its author agreements, according to Editorial Board member Christine L. Borgman. Good for you, Christine and JASIS!!!

Excerpt from Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed Aug. 22: Publishing and Values (main focus is Anthrosource moving to Wiley Blackwell):

Christine L. Borgman is a professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, to be published in October by MIT Press. She is also on the editorial board of a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell, The Journal of the American Society for Information Science.

That editorial board, she said, has been pushing Wiley to liberalize its author agreements, so that authors have more leeway to place their papers in online repositories. Currently, they have wide access to place their writings on their own Web sites, but limits elsewhere. Borgman said this model no longer makes sense competitively. More and more scholars, she said, “want repository-friendly journals” and won’t publish in places they don’t view as committed to some measure of open access. Why publish in a journal that is closed off, she said, when you can be in a journal where more people will find your research?

Borgman said that the journal’s editorial board is still waiting for a response from the publisher.

Hat tip to Peter Suber, Open Access News.