From: Sally Morris <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 13:20:57 +0000

Surely the term 'Open Access' refers to the access - which is, after all,
far and away the most important point;  any stipulations about reuse are
not, strictly, about access?

Sally Morris
[log in to unmask]

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From: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
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Sent: 24 December 2011 03:22
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Subject: Re: Taylor & Francis Opens Access with new OA Program

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