Abstract
Copyright policy and copyright terms have a direct effect on the proper usage of academic papers. However, there are many journals which don't have very clear terms of usage policies in Japan. In 2009 a survey was conducted on the copyright practices of Japanese academic societies. As a result two templates of copyright terms for academic journals were proposed. In the literature research of 50 journals (mainly written in Japanese) it was found that copyrights for nearly 80% of the journals belonged to the society. Important provisions included the right of reproduction, the right of public transmission, the rights of translation and adaptation, the permission to use the works, the usage by the author, and the author obligation. Then 20 societies were interviewed. The survey results reflected that the size of society's departments affected the frequency of revising the copyright terms and operational scheme. In addition, both revenues and discipline of each society affected the scope of permission for example it was found that commercial publishers had detailed copyright terms. The interviewed societies preferred “Wide” to “Narrow” permission to ensure continued submission. They preferred to maintain the author's right of paper usage for submission to institutional repositories (IRs) and publication from IRs as optional. From the results of the literature research and the interview survey, we made two templates for copyright practices based on the “Wide” permission reviewed by lawyers. Consequently, two final legally-valid templates were published online. The following is an example of the review of copyright terms for the journal “JOHO-KANRI” with the template so that society publishers can make use of the templates.
