A collaborative community for planetary sciences.

There is an access barrier to the peer-reviewed journal literature in our field. We think that should change.

For the most part, when we publish a peer-reviewed paper, we do so without expectation of payment, and yet we sign away the copyright to that work to a private corporation. These companies, which are then the legal owners of the work, create barriers and tolls to the access of the work that was often paid for by public monies for the public good.

We think that there is something wrong with this situation, and we are not alone. In 2001, the Open Society Institute convened a meeting in Budapest which gave rise to the Budapest Open Access Initiative which is a statement of principle, strategy, and commitment to the open access movement.

We think that the Planetary Sciences community should embrace the open access movement. There are a number of things, both big and small, that can be done by individuals, societies, universities, institutions, and governments.

Planetary Sciences Open Access

The links on this page to general open access information are great resources, and provide a number of different ways to pursue open access goals, with activities ranging from easy to difficult. If you are new to open access, the book Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects is a good place to start. Naturally, most of the book's content is open access, and there is a collection of links to the chapters over at the EPrints website.

We think that the best way to bring open access to Planetary Sciences is by starting small, and getting people informed.

Self-Archiving

In addition to informing people about open access, we also encourage people to properly self-archive their peer-reviewed papers which have already been published. There is an excellent self-archiving FAQ available. It might involve a little work, many journals in our field require that you self-archive a self-produced copy of the final paper. Just simply posting the journal-produced PDF of your paper often violates the copyright transfer agreement that you signed.

Journal Policies on Self-Archiving

We have some information about particular journals and their policies towards self-archiving your papers. For those publishers that are not listed below, the SHERPA/romeo project has a great database.

• American Geophysical Union (JGR, GRL, etc.)
• Elsevier, Inc. (Icarus, EPSL, etc.)
• Mars Informatics, Inc. (Mars)

However, there is no substitute for carefully reading the copyright transfer agreement that you signed for each paper that you have already published (you did keep that didn't you). If you no longer have that agreement, the publisher most certainly does and can send you a copy. If the publisher's policy has become more self-archiving-friendly since you published, try writing the publisher to get the same permissions for your older paper that the publisher is now granting their authors.