Journal author rights and self‐archiving: the case of Spanish journals

Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The lack of clarity of publisher permissions for archiving in OA repositories affects the adoption of the green OA route. This paper explores editorial policies and self‐archiving conditions in 1,615 Spanish scholarly journals. 48% are published by university and research institutions, 25% by associations/societies, and 17% by commercial publishers; social sciences and humanities (SSH) accounted for 67% of the journals (44.5% and 22.5%, respectively) followed by health sciences (20%); 71% offered gratis access immediately after publication, and 11% after an embargo; 31% provided some mention of author rights. Self‐archiving was specifically allowed by 65% of the journals; 52% were classified as ROMEO‐blue, 12% as green and 15% as white, and 21% could not be classified; 21%, mostly in SSH, used some type of Creative Commons license.


Introduction
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) defi nes open access thus: By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without fi nancial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. 1,2 As the BOAI indicates, having open access to scientifi c and scholarly outputs is closely tied to the issue of permissions required of both humans and machines to reuse scholarly works; not only to download and read them, but also to be integrated into other, interoperable information ecosystems comprising larger information resources. 3 Beyond fair use, the use of papers published in scholarly journals is subject to the permissions granted by the copyright holders, e.g. for archiving in open access (OA) repositories, for commercial use, or for any other purposes. Therefore, it is essential for journals to defi ne their editorial policies on exploitation rights and economic rights, whether or not these are restrictive.
According to Spanish intellectual property law, harmonized with European Directive 2001/29/EC, 4 author rights include moral and economic rights. Moral rights are not transferable and include the attribution of authorship and the integrity of the work; economic rights include copyright (right to make copies and derivative works, distribution, display, and performance). Economic rights are transferable in whole or in part, and have spatial and temporal coverage. In the case of scholarly publishing, when the copyright assignment is not exclusive, authors and publishers have to negotiate the terms upon which either party uses the work; when copyright is exclusively transferred, the publisher is the sole owner and decides how authors and readers can use the papers. This does not mean that the publisher can impose restrictions per se. In fact there are some journals that distribute their papers under publication licenses that allow their reuse under certain conditions, such as Creative Commons (CC) licenses. 5 In brief, a journal's copyright policy identifi es and defi nes the copyright owner and author and publisher rights, respectively.
A license for publication can also be created following a model, such as the SURF Foundation license, 6 which specifi es the rights reserved by authors and publishers for optimal access, including the rights for educational or research use, and for dissemination. Authors and/or publishers can create their own license, but every case should answer some basic questions. First, which versions of the work are reusable? (The author pre-print, the author post-print, or the version of record?). Second, when are versions reusable? (Immediately after acceptance or after publication? After an embargo?) Third, what purposes do versions serve? (Academic and research purposes? Commercial purposes?) And fourth, is the creation of derivative works allowed? (And if it is, should share-alike involve the derivative work?) These questions can help authors or publishers create a license to publish with the basic provisions to reuse the work without permission of the copyright holder. In this sense, the SURF-hosted Copyright Toolbox 7 provides sample wording to defi ne these provisions about the further use of works and their meaning. Since 2006 the OA movement in Spain has steadily gained momentum, resulting in an increase of institutional OA repositories, the adoption of new OA policies, the launch of new OA journals, and conversion of older publicatins to OA, among other OA initiatives. 8 Some of those journals have also adopted an increasing number of open licenses. However, the terminology used in editorial policies to describe rights issues is still inadequate, as indicated in previous studies on information science journals 9 and on several social sciences disciplines. 10 This lack of clarity in publishers' policies leaves authors concerned that they might infringe copyright, and that inhibits them from depositing in OA repositories. 11 In addition, policies can change over time, and this means that librarians and repository managers have to contact publishers to ask permission to deposit material. 12 Tools such as SHERPA/RoMEO can assist copyright clearance. However, up to 2011 very few Spanish journals were recorded in the SHERPA/RoMEO 13 database of publisher policies on copyrights and permissions for self-archiving. This was one reason why the Spanish research group Acceso Abierto a la Ciencia 14 ('Open Access to Science') started to map Spanish scholarly journals in terms of author rights and permissions for self-archiving works in institutional and subject repositories and on personal web pages. This information has been collected in a database attached to the portal DULCINEA, 15 which also classifi es journals using SHERPA/RoMEO color taxonomy. While RoMEO was the inspiration for the directory, DULCINEA has provided the groundwork for a number of other directories: the directory of French scholarly journals Héloïse, 16,17 the Brazilian portal Diadorim, 18 and the Portuguese project Blimunda 19 (all of which also share RoMEO taxonomy).
Preliminary results 20,21 provided very useful information to go on with a further systematic study regarding copyright terms in the case of Spanish scholarly journals. This study sought to analyze editorial policies on copyright and permissions for self-archiving in OA repositories by discipline, publisher, use of open licenses, permissions, version allowed to deposit, and online access.

Methodology
The study examined the Spanish scholarly journals that are active and visible on the Internet, at least to the level of summaries or abstracts. 'Spanish' refers to journals created in Spain, regardless of publisher origin (Elsevier, Springer, etc.), 'scholarly' refers to journals that published any smaller or larger number of peer-reviewed original research articles per volume, and 'active' refers to journals that were being published at the time of the study (note that whenever a delay in The study examined the Spanish scholarly journals that are active and visible on the Internet publication was detected, the editors were contacted to confi rm that their journal was still active); fi nally, 'visible' means either that the journal's contents were available online (regardless of the type of access required) or at least the journal had a webpage with list of contents, contact persons, and general information about the journal. The fi rst list of journals titles was compiled using the CSIC databases, 22 Dialnet, 23 the directory and catalog Latindex, 24 and Ulrich's Periodicals Directory. 25 After title lists were compared and duplicates had been removed, the list of 2,411 journals was further reduced to 1,628 after a thorough check on journal adequacy and status (see the criteria above) because some of them (n = 783) were inactive, or did not correspond to a serial title, or they were not peer reviewed. New titles have since been added and the number of journals varied according to the source (the CSIC databases and the repository Dialnet each list approximately 1,900 titles, Latindex lists approximately 1,700 and Ulrich's provides over 2,000); overall, however, we estimate the number of Spanish scholarly journals active and visible on the Internet might between 1,700 and 1,800. The sample used in the study comprised 1,615 titles. The study covers journals analyzed until September 2013, which according to this estimate represents approximately 90% of existing active Spanish journals. Data collection was conducted using an online survey sent to journal editors and was then continued using a manual search on the Internet and direct enquiries to editors and publishers by email or telephone.

The DULCINEA database
Journal data were collected in a database, browsable through the DULCINEA portal and comprising the following metadata: Finally, journals were classifi ed according to RoMEO colors 26 depending on the permissions for self-archiving in an institutional or subject repository or on personal webpages, where 'green' means that both the pre-print and post-print could be archived, 'blue´ indicates that the post-print could be archived, 'yellow' means that the pre-print could be archived, and white indicates that archiving was not formally supported.

Statistical analysis
A multiple correspondence analysis was performed to detect underlying relationships or associations within journals using the following variables and their modalities: discipline, publisher, rights statement, online access, permission for self-archiving, RoMEO color, and use of CC licenses.

Discipline and publisher
As Table 1 shows, journals publishing in the two disciplines social sciences and humanities (SSH) together accounted for 67% of the journals (44.5% and 22.5%, respectively), followed by health sciences, which accounted for 20%. SSH journals were published mostly by universities and research institutions (63%), while health sciences journals were mainly produced and distributed by private and commercial publishers (47%), followed by professional associations and societies (35%  Publisher and online access Table 2 shows the type of journal online access (gratis, gratis after an embargo, or restricted to subscribers) granted by different types of publisher: in the sample, 71% of all the journals were available free of economic barriers (gratis) and if we add those journals which are gratis after an embargo, this results in 82%, mostly published by universities and/or and research institutions. Embargo periods were generally 3-12 months, as occurs in other journals (HighWire Press 28 ), but could occasionally be of 24, 36, or 48 months. The online content of journals published by commercial publishers was generally restricted to subscribers, although some

Author rights and permissions for self-archiving
The specifi cation of copyright terms and permissions for self-archiving has not been widely practised in scholarly publishing, as Gadd et al. 29 detected during an analysis of 80 scholarly publisher's copyright agreements. In fact, a high percentage of the journals in our study (31%) did not mention any of the terms commonly used to describe copyright. At the same time, however, when journal editors or pub-lishers were directly consulted about author rights and permissions for self-archiving materials, their responses were in general, positive and permissions were granted (see Table 4). Direct contact with editors also contributed to widespread good practices on how to choose publication licenses and defi ne author rights. 30 In order to fi nd the location of the copyright or exploitation rights description, we used home webpages, instructions to authors, and fi les accessed through hyperlinks. Commercial and private publishers defi ned authors rights the best, followed by universities and research institutions (Figure 1).
Social sciences and health sciences were the two disciplines in which copyright terms were most clearly located and defi ned ( Figure  2).
Because of its specifi c tabs for copyright notice and open access policies, the opensource software Open Journal Systems (OJS) has contributed to defi ning and locating copyright policies more easily. In our sample,

Table 4. Frequency of journals that allow self-archiving by access and rights description (values in brackets indicate corresponding percentages by rows)
Access and rights Self-archiving  210 journals used OJS, and of those, 53% were social science journals and 21% were humanities journals, thus providing fi gures that were slightly higher than those obtained previously by a survey among journals cre-ated with OJS. 31     Universidad Pablo de Olavide, and Universitat Politècnica de València have all adopted OJS software to create and manage their scholarly journals. Note that OJS offers the advantage that it is OAI-PMH compliant 32 and can be harvested by an OAI-PMH service provider. It also complies with the SWORD protocol, which allows fi le transfers from the journal to an OA repository created with DSpace or Fedora. The study also considered the type of access regarding specifi cation of copyright issues (see Figure 3). Among the journals whose contents were restricted to subscribers (n = 285), 62% presented no description of copyright, and many were published by Elsevier 33 and Springer, 34 whose policies are the same for journals from other countries. In journals with free (gratis) access and with free access after an embargo, the mention or description of author rights terms appeared in 72% and 57% of cases, respectively.

Permissions for self-archiving
Sixty-four per cent of the journals allowed self-62% presented no description of copyright   archiving, 15% did not allow self-archiving or deposit, and for the remaining 21% no information was available. The publishers that contributed most to the number of journals allowing self-archiving were universities and research institutions and other public bodies such as museums (see Figure 4). Within disciplines, the most striking differences were between the category health sciences and the category mathematics and physics (see Figure 5), the former published mainly by commercial and private companies and the latter group apparently affected by the habit of researchers for self-archiving in the subject repository Arxiv.
If we compare data about online access type and permission for self-archiving, 43% of the journals met the conditions of gratis and 'libre' 35 and, regardless of the access type they offered, 64% of the journals permitted selfarchiving. Regarding the statement of rights and permissions, some journal editors declared that they allowed self-archiving when they were directly consulted, even though their the most striking differences were between health sciences and mathematics and physics  journal policy statement made no reference to this (see Table 4).

Classifi cation of journals according to RoMEO colors
Depending on which version could be deposited in institutional or subject repositories and on personal webpages, journals were classifi ed using SHERPA/RoMEO colors. As Figure  6 shows, 64% allowed self-archiving of some version of work (author pre-print, author post-print, or version of record). These data are similar to the data provided by RoMEO about the journals contained in its database. 36 Note that in the case of blue journals with free access, the most frequently chosen version was the version of record (see Figure 7).
In the case of toll access journals published by commercial and private companies the predominant color was green (Figure 8), a refl ection of the large number of journals published by Elsevier and its editorial policy for self-archiving, although this condition is also subject to the existence of institutional OA mandates.
SSH journals together represented 73% of the total blue journals (see Figure 9).
As Table 5 shows, a total of 332 journals (21% of the journals examined) distributed their contents under CC licenses. This is 3% higher than found in an earlier study, 37 supporting the view that this is an increasing trend since these licenses were created. 38 Again, SSH journals used proportionally more CC licenses than other disciplines, and universities and research institutions were the publishers generating the largest number of journals with these licenses.

Statistical analysis of qualitative variables
Multiple correspondence analysis of the variables discipline, publisher, access, rights statement, permissions, use of CC licenses, and RoMEO color is described by the graph in Figure 10. One strong association was found among the journals published by universities and research institutions, social sciences, humanities and engineering, free access, blue RoMEO color coding, and permission for selfarchiving. At the opposite extreme are the health science journals with restricted access published by commercial and private publishers. In the center of the graph we see the journals published by foundations, scientifi c associations and societies, and governmental bodies, mainly in life sciences, experimental sciences, and physics.
According to these results, a high percentage of Spanish scholarly journals appear to share the following features: • they are published by a university or research institution; • they are dedicated to the study of the social sciences or the humanities; • online access is free (gratis); • copyright and author rights are visibly described; • they allow self-archiving of the author postprint or the version of record; • RoMEO color classifi es them as blue journals.

Conclusions
As we have seen, SSH journals dominate, and 64% allowed self-archiving of some version of work this affects the analyses. There are several reasons for this. One is the Spanish social scientist's tendency to publish in his or her own language, even though many Spanish journals also accept papers in English or in other languages, such as French or Portuguese. Another reason is that certain Spanish-language SSH journals were launched more than 50 years ago (e.g. Archivo Español de Arte in 1925, Hispania and Revista de Educación in 1940, Anuario Musical in 1946 or Anales Cervantinos in 1951) and have been consolidated and recognized by readers and authors to the degree that they also have international prestige. A third reason is that most of these journals are published by universities and research institutions, whose policies favouring OA to scholarly outputs we believe have contributed to the good health and sustainability of the jour-nals they publish. Finally, these journals generally offer free (gratis) access or free access after an embargo and allow self-archiving and the reuse of works for other responsible purposes.
Turning to the second-most common group of Spanish scholarly journals, the journals dedicated to health sciences have two distinct sub-sets: those from commercial and private publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Aran Ediciones or Viguera Editores that restrict access by subscription fees (although some publishers allow self-archiving of the author pre-print or post-print); and journals published by professional and associations and learned societies, universities and research institutions that offer free (gratis) access and allow self-archiving in OA repositories. Clearly the acquisition of a large Spanish publisher by Elsevier has had a substantial effect on the scene. the acquisition of a large Spanish publisher by Elsevier has had a substantial effect on the scene Figure 10. Two-dimensional representation of the multiple correspondence analysis with the following variables and their modalities: discipline (cat), type of publisher (Edit), rights statement (rights), access (Acc), permission for self-archiving (self-arch), RoMEO color and use of Creative Commons licenses. Cat1: fi ne and performing arts; Cat2: health sciences; Cat3: life sciences; Cat4: experimental sciences; Cat5: social sciences; Cat6 humanities; Cat7: engineering; Cat7: mathematics and physical sciences. Edit1: university and research institutions; Edit2: commercial and private publishers; Edit3: scientifi c associations and societies; Edit4: museums; Edit 5: foundations; Edit 6: royal academies; and Edit (7) governmental bodies. Acc1: free access; Acc2: gratis after an embargo; Acc3: access restricted to susbscribers. Self-arch0: not allowed; self-arch1: not mentioned; Self-arch1: allowed.
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Self-archiving is allowed for at least 65% of journals. This implies a high level of compliance with OA policies at national, European and international levels for mandating to deposit.
We found that there is often still a lack of clarity, indeed complete absence in some cases, in stated policies on author rights and archiving. Publishers could help the rest of the community by rectifying this defi ciency.