They tend to require they not be sent elsewhere for publication. That usually doesn't include archiving them on the lab's website, sending via email, etc. They're just not interested in double-publishing.
It has been the policy of my lab, and many others, to ignore journal policies on publishing manuscript versions, and post them on our website after the journal publishes the paper. We've never heard of any complaints about this practice, and it results in the papers being available on Google Scholar.
Is it really that onerous to do whatever it is you want with your paper, and then just send a copy to the people who gave you your funding?
The State of California funds a lot of research, and having it all available in one place should make things like archiving much easier.
My lab has all our papers available on our website,
but my supervisor is old. He's not going to live forever. It won't be too long after he goes that the website will go too. The server needs security updates every once in a while. The DNS will expire in ten years. We don't use HTTPS, but if we did, it would expire within a couple years. All easy stuff, but when the only person responsible for doing it has died, it won't get done.
So true. It's not like publishing your paper on your lab's website will satsify the "publish" requirement for obtaining tenure. Why can't we separate the process of peer review from the process of letting a journal handle distribution of the paper?
My pet peeve when downloading articles from journals is that it is a chain of needless HTTP redirects and elaborate cookies. If you are accessing the network from an approved IP address, is all that really necessary? Why can't it be a simple direct download? Answer: Because they've commercialized the process of reading publicly-funded research results. And with that comes the usual mindless hoop-jumping for even the simplest things.
Many investigators will just post a copy on their lab's website anyway. And that's the link that they will often give to students who need a copy of the paper. So the whole scheme of commercializing the publishing of noncommercial research just looks silly.
Possibly in some medical or social science fields, I don't know. I know there is not such an issue in chemistry and materials science. There also may be some complications for collaborations with industry, but that's kinda a different situation. For people whose career development is not strongly tied to reproducibility of their work (a.k.a. everybody) it's just another step in the overly complex process of publishing in for-profit journals. Funding agencies generally aren't going to punish people for using this excuse and the watchdogs/groups concerned with reproducibility have no teeth.
Not an excuse, but journals don't make it easy to share files, as hard as that is to believe. Some will only take PDFs for supplemental information and many have garbage UIs, stupidly small file size limits, etc. Just uploading to a repo (or tagged release) on GitHub is common these days because there is much less friction.
I work at a National Lab, and all my publications are available for free. However, that's not done through the website of the publishing journal, it's done through my Lab's portal.
The main requirement journals have is that we don't distribute the journal's marked-up final version. So we make them available as "Lab Reports" with our own typesetting, front cover, and so on.
O, good point. For universities they probably have a system in place, but otherwise you could put on open access, on arXiv, on viXra, whatever. Is important to have anything even independent might sent too if needing.
One reason is that some journals require you to transfer copyright to them as a condition for publication. Usually, the journals then license the paper back to the corresponding author for limited personal distribution, but sometimes it may be the case that posting your research on your website would be a violation of copyright.
For an example, here's the transfer form for the American Chemical Societies journals: http://pubs.acs.org/page/copyright/journals/index.html (the ACS has historically been one of the bigger roadblocks, along with Elsevier, to more OpenAccess reform).
> Why can't you upload a copy in Institutional Repository and publish it in a journal? Do journals set any rules?
Generally, when a researcher publishes a work in a journal, they either assign copyright to the journal or give the journal an exclusive publishing license.
Ordinarily, that prevents researchers from making their papers publicly available elsewhere, and "Green" and "Gold" open access policies are the exception.
>The problem with these lab books is that they're often the personal property of the scientists and, as such, almost a sort of diary
Further complicating things, individual researchers don't actually own the books. Often, an institution or the lab owns the rights to the book. This can make individuals who are otherwise keen on "open science" hesitant to place copies of this information in a publicly accessible place.
See page 4 of this manual from the NIH (National Institutes of Health) about the ownership of notebooks.
Nature, for example, permits private redistribution of accepted papers - I could send you a copy if you asked me for one - but requires exclusive publishing rights - I couldn't just put it on my website for anyone to take.
Umm...not sure what to tell you about that, other than you’re potentially out of compliance with the terms you and your institution agreed to.
I think there is a 6-12 month “exclusivity” period still, and some journals handle that automatically if you acknowledge federal funding. For example, Current Biology moved our stuff out from behind the paywall automatically on its publication anniversary.
I’m not sure if anyone has been sanctioned for not following these, but NIH progress reports/renewals require a PMCID for any papers you want to claim. You want to claim a lot on these to demonstrate productivity, so....there’s a good incentive to do this.
> You can often email a researcher and they will sometimes send a pre-print version of the article if you don't have access.
Most of us would send the final published version with proper formatting. It’s not even subversive, it’s something included in the non-commercial uses of the license agreements. Here’s Elsevier, but the others are similar: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright .
TL;DR: sending pdfs is perfectly ok; what they don’t want is uploading them to servers (which is perfectly ok morally but not so legally (yet)).
“Authors publishing via subscription models may also self-archive a copy of the accepted version of their manuscript (post-peer review, but prior to copy-editing and typesetting) in an institutional or subject repository, where it can be made openly accessible after an embargo period, in accordance with the relevant Springer Nature self-archiving policy (Nature, Springer, or Palgrave Macmillan)”
- via their non-commercial personal homepage or blog
- by updating a preprint in arXiv or RePEc with the accepted manuscript
- via their research institute or institutional repository for internal institutional uses or as part of an invitation-only research collaboration work-group
- directly by providing copies to their students or to research collaborators for their personal use
- for private scholarly sharing as part of an invitation-only work group on commercial sites with which Elsevier has an agreement
After the embargo period
- via non-commercial hosting platforms such as their institutional repository
- via commercial sites with which Elsevier has an agreement“*
(Seems a bit less constrained than SpringerNature)
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