Publishers and Open Access


Publishers, journals and their policies regarding Open Access and Self-Archiving
These summaries are for the publishers default policies and changes or exceptions can often be negotiated by authors. All information is correct to the best of our knowledge but should not be relied upon for legal advice.

On behalf of the Leiden University you have been requested to submit your publication (book, journal article, congress paper) to the Leiden Repository. Or, when it concerns your dissertation, you are even under an obligation to submit this online to obtain your doctorate. You are also asked to indicate whether your publication can be made available in the repository or whether it has to be put under embargo. Can you figure this out for yourself? If you use the guidelines and assistance noted below, hopefully you can. We have gained plenty of experience over the last couple of years in finding information on what is and what is not allowed by publishers. We have tried to summarise this in an orderly manual.  
Journal articles
Articles dating from before 1997 can be submitted to the repository without any problem, because before this date no arrangements were made with publishers about internet copyright.


From 1997 onwards the following rule applies: if the publication in question is a journal article there is an important distinction between your own version (the accepted version as it was submitted to the publisher, the so called post-print) or the publisher's pdf. If it is the publisher's pdf it will be harder to get permission to make the article freely accessible and often you will only be allowed to provide a link to the article on the publisher's website.

However if the publication is you own version (which is often the case for dissertations) there are many more possibilities and the publication is usually allowed to be posted on your personal website, your institute's website or an institutional repository (so-called self-archiving).

To figure out what is allowed with different types of publication, you can use the sites mentioned below:


  • To start you can check out our publisherslist (pdf); this is a growing list of a number of publishers associated with Leiden University. This list is regularly expanded with new information and for additions or questions, feel free to email us (auteursrecht@library.leidenuniv.nl).
  • SHERPA is a website that, for many important publishers, offers exactly this kind of information; namely the publisher's complete self-archiving policy for pre- and post-prints and publisher's pdfs. On this website you can search by journal name or publisher's name. 
  • If you cannot find the specific journal in SHERPA you can use the following website to discover the publisher of the journal: Ulrichsweb. When you have found the publisher, you can check the publisher's homepage by using a Google search. On this homepage you can browse for information about the publisher's policy. Good places to look are the possible "copyright and permissions" or "instructions for authors" pages.


If you have discovered from these sites described above that the journal in question does not allow self-archiving, you can still ask them per email to make an exception for your specific case; experience with these permission requests shows that permission is often granted when the self-archiving is for non-commercial purposes only. 


If after all this you still have not pertained permission, or cannot find any information about your publisher, feel free to contact the Copyright Information Point with your questions.
Books
For books the copyright issues are usually more complicated than for journal articles and can vary strongly between the different faculties of the university. Some general remarks, however, can be made on this subject.


  • Just as for journal articles, books published before 1997 can be submitted to a repository without any trouble, because before this date no agreements on copyright were made by publishers concerning internet copyright.
  • A number of publishers has been found prepared to accept an embargo period of two years (counting from the publication date) for certain dissertations published in book form (for more information on these publishers, please contact the Copyright Information Point).
  • Books published by LUP (Leiden University Press) as a Printing-on-Demand edition, and books published as LOT publications (by the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics), are allowed to be made publicly accessible. So these can be submitted to the repository without trouble or an embargo period.
  • In all other cases you will have to consult your publisher, or if the book still has to be published and agreements have not yet been signed, you could negotiate the issue. For this negotiation process we would like to refer you to the Copyright toolbox by JISC-SURF (the page What authors can do can also be of help). If your publication is a dissertation you can also use this permission letter (pdf).
Copyright and the year 1997
1997 is a significant year for copyright.

up till 1997
All publications published before and in 1997 can be submitted to the Leiden Repository without problems. This is because publishers did not start to claim the copyright for carriers other than paper until 1997. (Wilma Mossink wrote a study on this subject: 'Overdracht auteursrecht' (pdf). Unfortunately this study is only available in Dutch).


after 1997
In the period after 1997 the copyright could have been claimed by your publisher. However, this depends on whether you have actually transferred your copyright (in writing) to your publisher or if you have signed an exclusive licence. Even in this case the policy your publisher adhers to could still be more liberal than would be expected and allow things such as online archiving of the author's version in an Institutional Repository. The copyright policy could also allow online archiving after a certain period of time, a so called embargo period. The version of the publication on a homepage (personal/faculty or university homepage) can then temporarily be made inaccessible. To this end the publication does not need to be deleted from the repository, it is sufficient to block access to this publication.


from now on
As part of Open Access Leiden we will use this website and other ways to draw attention to the rights that you have as an author and how to retain these. We will present information about which rights are important in different situations. To do this we will make use of the possibilities that the Creative Commons licences and the SURF Copyright Toolbox offer us.



If you have any further questions on Publishers and Open Access or copyright policies, please contact the Copyright Information Point (telephone: 071 527 2871)