The growing importance of open access in furtherance of scholarly communication has made copyright clearance a vital part of institutional repository (IR) management. Copyright management has been recognized as one of the most important and daunting tasks in IR workflows. IR copyright clearance process is labor intensive and can produce a great deal of redundant information. It is not clear if and how such copyright related-information obtained by IR institutions is kept, managed, or shared. The authors conducted an online survey to investigate IR copyright management workflows and best practices and to determine the demand for an effective and intuitive copyright management tool. Survey results show that copyright management practice in the field is still primitive and there is strong evidence of the demand for flexible, Web-based systems that are able to support workplace collaboration and allow IR staff to effectively update, find, retrieve, and share any copyright related information. This paper details the current IR copyright clearance practices and their challenges. It is the authors’ wish to call IR developers’ attention for effective technology solutions for IR rights management.

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

General Track, 24x7 Presentations

The session was recorded and is <a href="https://connect.funet.fi/p8im84xctjk/">available for watching</a> (this presentation starts at 0:32:35)