Fighting for a Scholar's Copyright

I'm a big fan of the Creative Commons project (not surprisingly). But the point of the sister project, the Science Commons, has always escaped me. So it's good to see the launch of the Scholar's Copyright project, since I can finally see what they are up to.

There's a very thorough explanation of why the Scholar's Copyright is necessary. Basically, it aims to codify certain kinds of rights that scientists want to retain, such as being able to place copies of their published work in repositories under a CC licence, or release papers freely after a certain period. This is achieved through a series of "Author Addenda" (you can tell you're dealing with academics, can't you?):

"Author Addenda" - a suite of short amendments that authors attach to the copyright transfer form agreements from publishing companies. The Addenda ensure, at a minimum, that scholarly authors retain enough rights to archive their work on the public Internet.

The three addenda are as follows:

* The OpenAccess-CreativeCommons 1.0 Addendum reserves the right for the author to post the published version (for example, as a .pdf file) immediately and to grant others a Creative Commons "Attribution NonCommercial" license to use the article.

* The OpenAccess-Publish 1.0 Addendum reserves the right for the author to post the published version immediately upon publication.

* The OpenAccess-Delay 1.0 Addendum reserves the right for the author to post the author's final manuscript version immediately and the published version six months after publication.

These look eminently sensible, and should help scientists (and others) fight for the right to post their work online without needing to hire a team of lawyers to do so. It's sad that such "concessions" need to be wrung from publishers in the first place, but, hey, nobody said OA was going to be easy.