From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:38:40 +0100

In a Q&A interview, executive director of Rockefeller University Press
Mike Rossner explains why he disagrees with the decision by Research
Councils UK and The Wellcome Trust to insist that any Gold OA articles
they fund should be made available under a CC-BY licence.

Some extracts:

“RCUK and Wellcome are fragmenting the licensing of their own content
by requiring CC-BY when they pay immediate access fees. If the
publisher does not offer an immediate access option but releases the
content at six months, Wellcome Trust leaves publishers’ licensing
terms in place, and those terms could be as far to the other side of
the openness spectrum as the publisher holding copyright with all
rights reserved. RCUK requires content released at six months to be
made available ‘without restriction on non-commercial re-use,’
effectively CC-BY-NC.

“In my opinion, the middle-ground of CC-BY-NC should be mandated for
all content. This licence could be used by any publisher regardless of
business model, and, I believe, it still achieves the funding
agencies’ goal of reuse of content for text and data mining.”

…

“RUP has no current plans to become an OA publisher, although we
remain open to the possibility if we could be assured of appropriate
support from funding agencies to cover our expenses as a selective
journal. For the time being, I believe that the subscription-based
business model for selective journals can and should coexist with the
OA business model."

…

“I believe that APCs for immediate access to a subset of content in an
otherwise subscription-based journal [Hybrid OA] can unfairly
distribute the costs of publication. As a publisher of “selective”
journals, our cost per article is higher than the current standards
for APCs for immediate access, even the $5,000 fee that is now charged
by some journals.”

…

“I specified a cost per article of ~$10,000 three years ago. I have
not redone the calculation since then.”

…

“I do support licensing terms that provide reuse rights. I just don’t
think it is necessary to invoke a licence that is potentially
detrimental to subscription-based publishers to do so.”

More here: http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/rockefeller-university-press-cc-by-is.html

Richard Poynder