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] -----Original Message----- From: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of LIBLICENSE Sent: 24 December 2011 03:22 To: [log in to unmask] 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