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