Elektronisk publicering doktorsavhandlingar, obefogad oro?

A project on electronic publishing of doctoral dissertations in fulltext started in 1998 at the Lund University Library. Dissertations that consist of a number of articles that have already been published in or submitted to scholarly journals posed a potentional problem with regard to copyright questions. In order to solve this problem, the commersial publishers were approached with a request for permission to publish the articles electronically as a part of the doctoral dissertation.

The experience from this attempt shows that from the publishers´ perspective, electronic publishing is often perceived of as a threat, since the publishers´fear they will loose the control over the material. The authors often hesitate to ask their publisher´s permission because they are afraid it may put future academic publishing at risk. A negotiable factor when it comes to copyright seems to be the amount of time that passes between the first publishing of the article and the electronic publishing of the doctoral dissertation. The time factor is valuable in the negotiation between the author and the publisher, since this aspect seems to reduce the uncertainties of electronic publishing for the publisher as well as for the author.