Open Access: An analysis of European publisher copyright and licensing policies today

The digital age has brought authors of publications many more opportunities to gain further impact and visibility by sharing their work online through websites, pre-print servers, repositories, publishing platforms or other digital venues as well as journals. Publisher copyright policies have not always been enablers of these new practices but change is underway. Europe has also seen a surge in international, national and local Open Access (OA) policies in recent years, a significant one being Plan S with its requirements related to rights retention and open licensing. How far are publishers in supporting authors in this change? In early 2020 SPARC Europe commissioned a report to gain a better understanding of current copyright and licensing practices amongst scholarly journal publishers based in Europe and how these are presented to academic authors. The key purpose of the study was to provide evidence on how publisher policies support OA and to see whether the complexity of the copyright and self-archiving landscape amongst publishers has simplified over time. We also explored how Plan S-ready publishers were with regards to the first principle of their policy related to authors or their institutions being required to retain copyright to their publications, calling for all publications to be published under an open license, preferably CC BY, immediately and under no embargo. Research was undertaken on various levels: the 2020 study reviewed the copyright, self-archiving and open licensing policies from 10 large legacy publisher websites and then asked these publishers to verify these findings. We also analysed the policies of pure open access journals in Europe from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). To limit the scope, Europe was taken as the focus of this research. This paper will firstly demonstrate how diversely publishers present and share information on their copyright, licensing and self-archiving policies and how challenging this can be for authors and the institutions that support them. We will also share findings on the specifics of publisher policies be they hybrid or pure OA. For example, examining how far large publishers currently allow authors to retain publishing rights for articles, to what extent they allow zero embargoes when self-archiving or how far pure OA journals use the CC BY license. This paper ends by making a number of recommendations to publishers, research funders, institutions and authors to ultimately support authors to more easily navigate this policy landscape and to be able to publish immediate OA.

Editorial

This is the first issue of a new scientific publication of the European Geophysical Society, which will serve as the official organ of the Section on Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics. At the General Assembly in Strasbourg, 1987, this Section started with a special Joint Symposium on "Computer Simulations in Fluid Dynamics - Earth, Atmosphere and Space Plasmas" with 8 contributions. This was followed, a year later in Bologna, by a Joint Symposium entitled "Chaos and Turbulence in Geophysics" with 20 contributions. Since then the group of "nonlinear" scientists within the EGS has grown rapidly in size and in the quality of its contributions presented at the General Assemblies of the Society. Nowadays the programme of this Section normally includes 10 or more independent sessions with a total of some 250-300 papers. This development encouraged the officers and the members of the Section to search for a journal of their own, rather than to distribute their papers in the "classical" journals ranging from solid Earth geophysics to planetary and space sciences. Originally, the Society was asked to join an already existing publication in the field of nonlinear sciences. After almost two years of negotiations with the editors and the publishers of the most accepted journals in the field, the Section members decided differently; namely to launch their own journal, preferentially with a well known European publisher. However, in view of the general decrease in financial support for science and the generally increasing overheads of the publishers, it was decided that the new journal should be published by the Society itself, as an independent publication owned and run only by the EGS. The Society and the editors of this new journal are pleased to offer a modern, international, interdisciplinary and refereed publication to a young and growing generation of geophysicists with no page charges and fast publication on a "first come - first published" basis. The subscription rates are modest both for libraries and for members of the Society. We hope that scientists from other disciplines will also enjoy reading this journal and that publishing in it will be rewarding for the authors. With best wishes, Dr. Arne K. Richter Executive Secretary