From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2014 22:36:12 -0500

[With apologies for cross-posting}

I would have posted this comment on Poynder's site except that it
exceeds the limit imposed there:

Richard has once again done us all a great service by focusing our
attention on problems that the OA movement has created for itself by
insisting on too rigid a definition of what qualifies as "open
access."  I have been arguing this point for some time, in various
places, and my attitude would be, in contrast to Paul Royster's, to
say "so much the worse for them" for being such purists and alienating
a large part of the community that might otherwise be allied with
them. Rather than abandon use of the term, as Paul wants to do, I
would instead urge that we more tolerant types simply ignore what the
purists want to do and keep going about our business, calling it "open
access" and encouraging others to think so too.  Why cede the battle
over definition to this small subset of ideologues when the real world
that Paul and I live in is going to forge ahead anyway with our
version of "open access"?

How have we gotten to this point anyway?  I would suggest one reason
is that the purists have been so focused on STM journal publishing
that they have been oblivious to developments in other sectors,
especially monograph publishing, where the needs and requirements are
quite different.  This is the gist of the AAUP Statement on Open
Access, which I drafted and was released in July 2007 during my term
as AAUP president. I published a fuller version of this as an article
in Learned Publishing titled "The Challenge of Open Access for
University Presses":

https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/sf268549k

In that essay I note the efforts within the CIC consortium of the Big
Ten plus Chicago to develop an OA model for monograph publishing in
the early 1990s. I have recently penned a long essay for a special
issue of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication that
traces the history of that project back to the 1970s when we first
began talking about ways to deal with the crisis in scholarly
publishing of monographs at Princeton University Press. The essay is
titled "Open-Access Monograph Publishing and the Origins of the Office
of Digital Scholarly Publishing at Penn State University." Another
essay that I wrote in 1996 titled "A Nonmarket Solution for Scholarly
Publishing?"  explains the rationale for the CIC project in terms that
presage what later came to be called "open access":
https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vr155

This essay has been acknowledged by Frances Pinter as providing
inspiration for the OA monograph publishing experiment she launched
when head of Bloomsbury Academic. Our own project in OA monograph
publishing at Penn State, which began with the launching of the Office
of Digital Scholarly publishing, jointly created by the press and
library at Penn State in 2005 (before the administrative merger of the
two units was effected later that year) was itself much influenced by
the pioneering efforts of the National Academies Press, which started
posting its monographs online for free access in 1995. None of these
efforts were conducted, or could have succeeded, under the terms
insisted upon by the CC BY license.

Why is it important to acknowledge that these efforts should be
legitimately called "open access"? Partly it's because the whole
linguistic apparatus of Green OA and Gold OA does not comfortably
apply to OA monograph publishing. The approach that almost all OA
monograph publishers have taken, and are likely to take in the future,
is better described by the CC BY-NC-ND license, but that approach is
not well captured in the dichotomous Green/Gold language.  It is not
Green OA because there is no earlier version of a monograph that gets
to be posted online once the published version has appeared.  It is
not quite Gold OA either, if that means CC BY is the governing model.
It is not coincidental, by the way, that Stevan Harnad, who has done
so much to champion Green OA, is reluctant to talk much about
monograph publishing, which he considers to be sufficiently different
from journal article publishing as not to be brought within the scope
of OA as he views it.

Another way of pointing out how ill the traditional language of OA
applies here is to challenge Peter Suber on his claim that "preprint"
versions of articles are free to disseminate because they are not
covered by assignments of copyright since they stand as earlier and
different versions of these articles. I'd like to see Peter defend
that argument as it applies to books. On that view, all those revised
dissertations that university presses (and academic commercial
publishers) have been publishing for years could not be seen as
incorporating the copyright in the dissertations; yet it has been the
standard practice of publishers for years to fill out the TX form when
registering copyright with the Copyright Office to claim the
dissertation as an earlier version of the work that is subsumed in the
new copyright for the revised dissertation that is being registered.
Have all these publishers operating in this way for many decades at
the insistence of the Copyright Office been making a mistake?  Or
consider how Peter's argument might apply to commercially published
fiction. Would an early draft of a Faulkner novel, for instance, be
free for a Faulkner heir to post online because it is a "different"
version of the novel and hence not covered by the contract Faulkner
signed with his publisher?  I'd suggest that there is no way this
argument could stand up in a court of law with respect to books, and I
would therefore urge that it is on shaky ground in application to
articles also.

Another reason is that the obsessive focus on STM publishing has
ignored the different needs of writers in the humanities and social
sciences. I have long argued that CC BY ignores the importance to
humanists of having their works translated accurately, for instance in
the very first issue of the JLSC:

https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vr910

(It is worth noting here that the language referring to distortion,
etc., in the earlier CC BY licenses no longer appears in these
licenses, so even that safeguard with respect to accurate translation
practices has disappeared.)  This is one reason that monograph
publishers like the new OA Amherst College Press (on whose search
committee for its new director I served) is unlikely to adopt the
rigid CC BY license as its standard.

Royster has noted how ill-suited such a license is to the actual
practices of IRs. Penn State's IR, for instance, where I have 81 of my
articles and books posted, uses the CC BY-NC-ND license as its
default:

https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/terms/

I would suggest, what Royster himself implies, that the CC BY license
is also not well suited to the emerging practices of library
publishing, which go beyond what traditional IRs have seen as their
limited mission.  I would fault Royster, however, for erecting a wall
between what presses and libraries do. He is right to be suspicious of
the constraints under which presses are compelled to operate these
days, but he does not properly give credit, in my view, to the
advances that presses have already made in OA publishing, with not
only the National Academies Press and Penn State Press as examples but
also many other presses like California, Michigan, Purdue, and now
Amherst. (See the first table in my LP article cited above.)

His larger point, however, is very well taken: the OA community gains
nothing, and stands to lose a lot, by insisting on linguistic purity.
Among other things, as Royster's comments show, the whole library
publishing movement now organized under the auspices of the Library
Publishing Coalition would be marginalized as not part of the
movement, which is a ridiculous position to take, especially for an
organization like SPARC that purports to represent the interests of
libraries and was, after all, created by the library community in the
first place. Heather is simply out of step with her own major
constituents, surprisingly since I view her as one of the more
sophisticated thinkers in this terrain.  Why should the views of a
small handful of people who met in Budapest be allowed to run
roughshod over the views of many more people, such as the considerably
greater number who were involved in the efforts in the CIC early in
the 1990s, well befoie the Budapest group convened? Why should not the
CIC definition be more properly viewed as the origin of the movement,
with the BOIA crowd having been latecomers to the discussion, which is
the actual fact, historically? The CIC folks at least had a much
broader vision that encompassed not just STM journal publishing but
all types of scholarly publishing including monographs.

So, my preferred solution, pace Royster, would be not to have us with
the broader vision retreat from our effort to advance the cause of OA
using that terminology but rather to keep fighting our good fight and
let the purists end up marginalizing themselves.  There is too much
rhetorical (and political) advantage in using the language of OA not
to retreat in the face of this ideological attempt to label us as
heretics but instead fight back. We have the numbers on our side, as
the statistics cited by Richard already show.

P.S. I was amused by the references to Marx at the end of the
interview. So far as I know, I am the only AAUP president ever to cite
Marx prominently in an AAUP presidential address (I cited not only
Karl but Groucho!)

https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/sf2685471.

Sandy Thatcher

*******

At 7:45 PM -0400 9/1/14, LIBLICENSE wrote:

From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2014 12:23:05 +0100

Paul Royster (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) is proud of what he has
achieved with his institutional repository. Currently, it contains
73,000 full-text items, of which more than 60,000 are freely
accessible to the world. This, says Royster, makes it the second
largest institutional repository in the US, and it receives around
500,000 downloads per month, with around 30% of those going to
international users.

Unsurprisingly, Royster always assumed that he was in the vanguard of
the OA movement, and that fellow OA advocates attached considerable
value to the work he was doing.

All this changed in 2012, when he attended an open access meeting
organised by SPARC in Kansas City. At that meeting, he says, he was
startled to hear SPARC announce to delegates that henceforth the sine
qua non of open access is that a work has to be made available with a
CC BY licence or equivalent attached.

After the meeting Royster sought to clarify the situation with SPARC,
explaining the problems that its insistence on CC BY presented for
repository managers like him, since it is generally not possible to
make self-archived works available on a CC BY basis (not least because
the copyright will invariably have been assigned to a publisher).
Unfortunately, he says, his concerns fell on deaf ears.

The only conclusion Royster could reach is that the OA movement no
longer views what he is doing as open access. As he puts it, "[O]ur
work in promulgating Green OA (which normally does not convey re-use
rights) and our free-access publishing under non-exclusive
permission-to-publish (i.e., non-CC) agreements was henceforth
disqualified."

If correct, what is striking here is the implication that
institutional repositories can no longer claim to be providing open
access.

In fact, if one refers to the most frequently cited definitions of
open access one discovers that what SPARC told Royster would seem to
be in order. Although it was written before the Creative Commons
licences were released, for instance, the definition of open access
authored by those who launched the Budapest Open Access Initiative
(BOAI) in 2001 clearly seems to describe the same terms as those
expressed in the CC BY licence.

What this means, of course, is that green OA does not meet the
requirements of the BOAI - even though BOAI cited green OA as one of
its "complementary strategies" for achieving open access.

Since most of the OA movement's claimed successes are green successes
this is particularly ironic. But given this, is it not pure pedantry
to worry about what appears to be a logical inconsistency at the heart
of the OA movement? No, not in light of the growing insistence that
only CC BY will do. If nothing else, it is alienating some of the
movement's best allies - people like Paul Royster for instance.

"I no longer call or think of myself as an advocate for 'open access,'
since the specific definition of that term excludes most of what we do
in our repository," says Royster. "I used to think the term meant
'free to access, download, and store without charge, registration,
log-in, etc.,' but I have been disabused of that notion."

For that reason, he says, "My current attitude regarding OA is to step
away and leave it alone; it does some good, despite what I see as its
feet of clay. I am not 'against' it, but I don't feel inspired to
promote a cause that makes the repositories second-class members."

How could this strange state of affairs have arisen? And why has it
only really become an issue now, over a decade after the BOAI
definition was penned?

More here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/the-open-access-interviews-paul-royster.html