Romeo Studies 3: How Academics Expect to Use Openaccess Research Papers

This paper is the third in a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers previous studies of the usage of electronic journal articles through a literature survey. It then reports on the results of a survey of 542 academic authors as to how they expected to use open-access research papers. This data is compared with results from the second of the RoMEO Studies series as to how academics wished to protect their open-access research papers. The ways in which academics expect to use open-access works (including activities, restrictions and conditions) are described. It concludes that academics-as-users do not expect to perform all the activities with open-access research papers that academics-as-authors would allow. Thus the rights metadata proposed by the RoMEO Project would appear to meet the usage requirements of most academics. Introduction The UK JISC-funded RoMEO (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving) project has been tasked with investigating the rights issues associated with the self-archiving of research papers by academics, and the subsequent disclosure and harvesting of metadata about those research papers using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). One of the key aims of the project is to produce some simple rights metadata elements that academics can use to describe the terms and conditions they want to impose on the use of their research papers in an open-access environment. To inform the development of this metadata, the project team performed a survey of 542 academic authors to ascertain both how academic authors wished to protect their own self-archived research papers, and how they expected to use such research papers. The survey is described in full in the first two papers in the RoMEO Studies series (Gadd, Oppenheim and Probets, 2003a, and 2003b), hereinafter referred to as RoMEO Studies1 and RoMEO Studies 2. RoMEO Studies 2 reported on how academics wished to protect their own open-access research papers. This, the third in the series, looks at how academics wish to use others’ papers. It also considers whether there is any significant difference between the way academics-as-authors wish to protect open-access research papers, and how academics-as-users wish to use them. This will show, in turn, whether the rights metadata developed by the project to protect research papers, informed by academics-as-authors, will actually meet the usage needs of academics-as-users. Previous research paper usage studies The term “usage” is a broad one that can be interpreted in a number of different ways. Copyright law defines a range of usage activities (copy, broadcast, lend, etc.) some of which exclusively belong to the copyright owner, and some that may be performed by non-copyright owners under certain terms and conditions. Lessig (2003) calls the former set of activities “copyright” activities and the latter set, “regulated”. There is also a third category of activities with which copyright law does not concern itself and Lessig terms these “unregulated” activities. The usage activities of interest to the RoMEO Project were those performed with open-access electronic research papers that fell into Lessig’s “copyright” and “regulated” categories. (For the purposes of this paper, such activities will be referred to as “copyrightregulated”). It was not concerned with unregulated activities. This was because we anticipated that the resulting rights metadata would provide less restriction on use than that provided by copyright law, but more than that provided by simply releasing a work into the public domain. If the RoMEO rights metadata began regulating activities that were unregulated under copyright law, this would go against the spirit of open-access. A search of the literature showed that, to date, investigations into the usage of open-access research papers on eprint archives have tended to focus on the depositing activities of authors, rather than usage by end-