The American Psychological Association has announced that it is targeting online piracy websites and not individual authors in its efforts to curtail the unauthorised sharing on the internet of articles published in the association's journals.
The move - a change to a recently launched pilot program - came in response to concerns voiced by some authors who were surprised to hear from their academic institutions that they should remove final APA copyrighted articles from their websites.
In February, the company Digimarc, under contract to APA, began sending article takedown notices to sites that had posted APA journal articles without permission. For the first 17 weeks of the pilot program, takedown notices targeted five APA journals. During that phase, APA found 72 percent of the articles published over two years in five APA journals were on pirate websites.
In the past week, APA moved into Phase 2 of the pilot, in which the takedown notices were expanded to all 29 of APA's official journals. The takedown notices went primarily to online file-sharing/piracy websites, but notices also went to about 80 university websites found to be violating APA’s posting guidelines.
Under APA's publishing guidelines, authors are free to post the final accepted, preformatted versions of their articles — the accepted manuscript — on their personal websites, university repositories and author networking sites without an embargo. However, any posted manuscripts must include a note linking to the final published article, the authoritative document.
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