09 April 2013

Emerald embargo on open access

You may have read that, in response to the UK government's policy on open access (which is hardly totally enlightened) Emerald, which publishes the Journal of Documentation, is to have a two-year embargo on papers being deposited in repositories. This, of course, makes nonsense of the idea of "open" access - two years is far too long a period for such an embargo. However, there may be good news in this: perhaps authors will be persuaded that publication in a genuinely open access journal like Information Research is to be preferred. After all, not only are all papers openly available to all from the moment of publication, but copyright rests entirely with the author who can then do anything he or she wishes with the paper: generate as many copies as necessary for a class handbook, put in the institutional repository, or whatever. I don't exactly look forward to an increase in submissions to Information Research, since we get just about as much as we can cope with now, but it will be interesting to keep an eye on things.