The project is organised in three subprojects:

1. Economics of the scientific publishing life-cycle process

This subproject will be carried out by one post-doctorate researcher (Turid Hedlund) and one Ph.D. student (Jonas Holmström). The work will build on the preliminary results to be achieved during 2003 in the European 5th Framework project SciX and will further develop the preliminary process model and cost analysis under development in that project. The aim of the modeling is to help us understand the scientific publishing process and how the Internet affects it, in order to provide a basis for a cost and performance analysis of various alternative ways of organizing it. The model can also work as a roadmap for positioning various new initiatives, such as e-print repositories and harvesting tools, within the overall system of scholarly communication.

2. Changing behaviour of scientists in seeking information

This subproject will be carried out by one post-doctoral researcher (Dr. Anssi Öörni) and one Ph.d. student (Paulina Junni). From the user's point of view the key issue in the provisioning of scientific information is today the multitude of very variable information technically available over the Internet. For part of the material libraries still act as middlemen in providing electronic access to paid for material, but part of the material they access independently using web references, general search engines and subject specific e-print archives. A key problem is such subscription-based material, which researchers and students need, but their university doesn't provide. Because of the easy availability of so much free information on the web readers dislike waiting longer than a few mouse clicks for information and paying out of the pocket expenses. Papers posted by the authors on their own home pages further shift the balance in favour of using just what's freely available.

In terms of quality assurance and time spent on searching for information the current situation is unsatisfactory. Freely available is not the same as easily available and often readers spend unnecessarily much time searching for information, which is not well indexed nor quality assured. One particular problem with such material is that when used as references a lot of it tends to disappear from the web in a relatively short time.

3. New copyright arrangements taking into account open access publishing.

This subproject will be carried out by Ph.D. student Olli Vilanka who graduated from Lapin yliopisto 2002 with a thesis in copyright law. The starting point for all discussions about copyright is that the authors originally own full copyright to their publications. They typically assign this right exclusively to journal publishers as a part of a bargain, which doesn't provide them any income but provides other benefits, in terms of visibility in different indexes, prestige etc. In practice this leads to situations where for instance the author of a Ph.D. thesis consisting of a number of previously published articles has to ask for permission to publish his own articles as part of a bound thesis or an electronic version in his university repository.

The copyright issue can be studied from a number of viewpoints. Firstly an empirical mapping of current contracts is needed. Furthermore an analysis of this contractual practice and of alternatives available should be carried out. Also the development in other fields of copyright can offer interesting parallels. Standard copyright arrangements for open source computer code can be mentioned in this respect.

In addition to content analysis an empirical approach will be applied in this project and it will look at the actual emerging use of different contractual forms. To what extent are for instance big publishers willing to relax the restrictions concerning non-commercial posting of copies on institutional repositories and e-print archives. Is this done openly, or by de-facto relaxing restrictions for individual authors who ask for this. A further dimension to be studied is the de-facto breaches of contract that many authors are guilty of. Many authors have bibliographies on the web, including full text pdf-versions of their work, and feel they have a moral right to do so, despite having signed copyright contracts. There are also few cases of publishers having sued authors for such copyright infringement, probably because of the bad publicity this would create. This is a very different setting than the battle between music producers and Napster! On the other hand the legal issues must be solved in order for institutional repositories to develop, since universities and their libraries want to be assured that they operate with legal limits.

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Updated: 09.09.2008