From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 12:13:33 -0800

Not sure why Michael Carroll believes I've accused him of being an OA
purist.  I've said simply that the use of the term "open access" is
ambiguous.

As for the substance of his post, three points:

1.  The rhetorical issue.  I repeat my earlier point, that OA means
different things to different people.  It is hopeless to try to get
people to understand all the different meanings, much less to get them
to agree on anything.  Hence I recommend that folks who share
Michael's view come up with a protectable term.  But this issue is
entirely rhetorical.

2.  Michael's second point touches on the topic of greatest concern to
me, not just for this discussion but more generally.  He complains
about the "noise."  I would have used a different term, but I believe
Michael is getting at acts of deception.  This is an unconscionable
situation.  He notes that some publishers are deceiving people by the
use of the term "open access," and I think he is sometimes correct.
It is less clear that everyone subscribes to Michael's definition of
OA (see #1), making it hard to prove this.  A personal example:  I was
asked to contribute an article to a journal a while back.  I agreed,
on the condition that the article be posted in an open form.  The
problem that I did not anticipate is that the publisher refuses to
allow the article to be indexed by Google, so the only way people can
find it is if I send them the URL.  But I could always attach a Word
document, so the "open" URL adds little value.  Do I feel cheated?
Yes.

3.  On the matter of principle, Michael and I are likely never to
agree.  He believes that OA (in some form) adds to the quality of
research.  I am skeptical.  He believes that there is a steady march
to OA.  I believe that there is a steady march to higher returns on
investment.  OA, to me, is simply another way of packaging services.
When it finds willing customers, it thrives.  When it doesn't, it
disappears.  Nothing magical about any of this.  It's called market
economics.  PLOS One is a great money machine, and I admire it
precisely for that reason.

Joe Esposito


On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 7:22 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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