You copy, right?

OK that was a crappy blog post title. But anyway, I was just reading about a new policy from Princeton University that forbids faculty from assigning all copyrights of their published work to journals. They will also support faculty who want to put copies of their published work on their web pages. Apparently other universities are implementing similar policies. This is to assure open access to work published by their faculty and particularly of federally funded research. I think this is a great goal, but I suspect that this policy might make it difficult to publish in certain journals. Many journals, including for-profit glamour magz require that you assign copyright to them, or else pay a ridiculous amount of money in order for the author to retain the copyright. Publishing in open access journals is also expensive. Will Princeton assist with these charges? The article claims that waivers will occasionally be granted, if so then this will strip the policy of any value that it has. Will it be OK if open access is made available after a few months as many journals do? This might all be a moot point anyway since the NIH and other agencies already require that you deposit an copy of your published manuscripts in PubMed Central, which is an open access database of NIH-funded articles. I wonder if this will be sufficient to fulfill Princeton’s requirement. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.