From: Michael Carroll <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:47:44 -0500

Hi Sandy,

My response to you is the same as my response to Joe.  Don't try to
put me into the "purist" box because I simply won't stay there.  I've
been an OA pragmatist from start to finish and anyone who's had any
dealings with me regarding OA, including you, should know that.

The PLoS Biology piece is focused on only one aspect of the OA
movement/ecosystem - journals that have changed their financing from
primarily subscriptions from the demand side of the market to the
supply side of the market through article processing fees.  These
journals use the term "open access" to label this shift to authors and
readers by calling themselves an "open access journal" or "open access
publication".  In this context, the use of this terminology is to
signal to authors and to readers that they are offering something
different from publication in a subscription-financed, toll access
journal.

So, we're not talking about what the term "open access" should mean
for the large and diverse set of folks who support changes in
scholarly communication that take advantage of the Internet to improve
research.

Instead, I'm responding to noise in the marketplace by different
publications using "open access" in this context to mean different
things regarding reuse rights.  Specifically, the point of the PLoS
Biology piece is to warn authors and their funders who are willing to
use grant funds or otherwise pay for this type of open access to make
sure they're getting their money's worth by getting what I'm calling
full open access or call it Gold OA or libre or whatever else
distinguishes read/write access from read-only access.  There's noise
in the marketplace when some supply-side funded publishers use CC-BY
and others use CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-SA.

The point I'd put to you and to Joe is, why this noise?  Once a
publisher decides to rely on supply-side funding, why the half-way
measures?  I expect the answer is revenue diversification, but too
easily this is just code for double-dipping.  The article processing
charges should reflect an author discount if the publication is using
something more restrictive than CC Attribution Only in order to
capture these other revenues.  Looking at the prices that primarily
commercial publishers are charging for pseudo open access, I don't see
the discount.

Why else aren't the commercial publishers and others that use one of
the more restrictive Creative Commons licenses willing to put a price
on the option to use a CC Attribution Only license on the content?  If
these publishers believe that retaining commercial rights has some
economic value - express this as net present value - and give the
author the option to purchase these in order to grant these reuse
rights to the public.

I suspect that publishers are not sure about what the value of these
commercial reuse rights are, so they want to hold on to these to make
sure that they can take advantage of new market opportunities to
commercially exploit the content in the future.  This is exactly the
problematic impulse.  The point of the switch to supply side funding
is to get paid now and to let go of control over future reuse of the
content subject to the attribution requirement.  Authors who agree
with this principle and are paying to implement it by publishing in an
open access publication need to be warned that not all so-called "open
access journals" are implementing this principle.  As a result, pseudo
open access journals are misrepresenting what they're selling.

So far, no one on this list or over at the Scholarly Kitchen has
engaged with this point, which is the only point for which I was
arguing in the PLoS Perspective piece.

Best,
Mike

Michael W. Carroll
Professor of Law and Director,
Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property
American University, Washington College of Law
Washington, D.C. 20016

-----Original Message-----
From: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2011 10:49 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Taylor & Francis Opens Access with new OA Program

From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:11:20 -0600


Michael is entitled to stipulate what OA should mean, and it is true
that various "declarations" (Budapest, Berlin, etc.) support this
recommendation. But is this a really useful approach for the OA
movement to take?

It would mean, for example, that many of the entries in the DOAJ would
have to be removed. As it is, does the DOAJ carry any annotations as
to whether a journal operate as OA libre or OA gratis?

It would probably also mean that very few publications using Gold OA
could continue to be called OA journals. Does PLoS abide by the
Budapest definition? Do all the Hindawi journals? Does any journal
published by a university press or commercial publisher?

It would almost surely mean that we could not apply OA to ANY book
publishing operations, such as the National Academies Press, OECD,
Penn State's Romance Studies series, Michigan's program,  Bloomsbury
Academic, the OPEN program of European university presses, etc. Under
current conditions, the only way any book publisher is likely to
succeed in doing OA publishing is if it is OA gratis, not libre. It
would be economic suicide for these publishers to allow any vendor
whatsoever to be "free riders" and to provide POD services when those
vendors have contributed nothing to the cost of producing the books.

And what about the authors? Do Michael and his fellow purists want to
deny those authors who have made literally thousands of dollars off of
republication of their articles in commercial anthologies or online
collections the benefits of their success?  (I can cite several
authors of articles published in Penn State Press journals who made
very handsome profits from their academic writings in this way.)

And what about the cross-subsidization of academic books that such
revenues from journal reprints have made possible? Does Michael want
to see fewer books published?

There is a cost to being a purist about OA. I do agree with Michael,
though, about transparency: if a publisher is making a lot of money
off of commercial reuses of works, then it should factor that revenue
into what is being charged to authors for getting their articles
published.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: Michael Carroll <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:39:25 -0500
>
>
> Whoa, foul Joe.  My post does not demand that the term "open access"
> as a whole be limited to the gold road, and no fair reading of this
> post or of my many other writings on the topic would support this
> interpretation.
>
> My point is limited to those publishers who have switched their
> funding model to the supply side (so called "author pays") and who
> signal this switch with the term "open access publication" or label
> themselves as "open access publishers".
>
> Authors deserve clear labeling so that they know what they are paying
> for.  My argument, and the position of OASPA and others, is that the
> term "open access publication" should be limited to those journals
> that grant the author immediate publication and grants the reading
> public the full suite of reuse rights subject only to the attribution
> requirement.  The argument is elaborated in the PLoS Biology article
> linked in the initial post, but the bottom line is that publishers who
> are double dipping behind the "open access publication" label are not
> being straight with authors.
>
> If their argument is that they're using a hybrid funding model, then
> they should use a term other than "open access publication" to signal
> to authors that they are not selling full open access as an option.  I
> propose "pseudo open access", as in real fake leather, but if that's
> too provocative, I can go along with "limited access" as a more
> neutral description.
>
> Best,
> Mike
>
> Michael W. Carroll