From: T Scott Plutchak <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2015 18:43:37 +0000 I’ll also echo Ann & Anthony’s comments. Having worked with Fred on a number of issues since our days on the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable I can attest to his strong commitment to seeking consensus among all stakeholders in the scholarly communication ecosystem. I believe this consultation is a good faith effort to do that. Anyway, here’s my take on it – some publishers are concerned that SCNs are becoming open repositories of articles for which they hold the copyright. They believe there is confusion within the community about whether or not it is legal to post copyrighted articles to SCNs and thus make them available to anyone else using that SCN. They would like to put a stop to what they perceive as a potentially worrisome trend. (See, as exhibit #1, Elsevier’s takedown notices to Academia.edu last December, which served no one’s interests very well). On the other hand, they recognize that some sharing of copyrighted articles is perfectly reasonable and they would like to be able to support that. STM, as the trade association for publishers (and bear in mind that, as an organization, STM is agnostic on the question of open access), is attempting to develop a shared consensus among publishers, SCNs, librarians and researchers about what the norms should be. Viewed in this context, I think the principles are straightforward. Researchers should be encouraged to post OA articles and the metadata for non-OA articles freely within SCNs, but they should not post the copies of copyrighted articles themselves. However, within “academic groups” (as defined in the document) researchers would be free to share copyrighted articles as well. This does seem to me to be a concession on the part of the publishers. Certainly not as much of a concession as many in the OA community would like, but a concession in the right direction, nonetheless. The intent of the initiative, then, is to see if we can get voluntary agreement on the part of all components of the community to adhere to these principles. If that were achieved, developers of SCNs would configure their systems to make the distinction between posting articles (OA) and metadata (for non-OA) clear and efficient and would provide support for “academic groups”. Researchers would use the systems to post OA articles, but would refrain from uploading copyrighted articles, except within those groups. Publishers would develop consistent policies that would encourage sharing of articles within those groups. All sectors would work together to try to develop systems that could track how much of this sort of sharing actually takes place. This would enable us to avoid ambiguity and mixed messages from SCNs about what kind of article sharing their systems should be used for, a flurry of individual and inconsistent policy statements on the part of publishers, and uncertainty on the part of users of the SCNs about what is appropriate when using these systems. These seem like reasonable goals to me. However, since I can’t think of anything on which the prominent voices in these debates currently agree, I’m uncertain what level of consensus can actually be reached. But it’s worth a try. The negative reaction to the Elsevier takedown notices in December indicates that at least some users of SCNs believe that it is perfectly legitimate for people to upload articles for which they do not hold the copyright and for any other users of those systems to obtain copies that way. I don’t know how widespread that view is, but those folks, of course, will not support these principles. I would like to think, however, that most people, even those who would like us to achieve a fully OA environment at some point, would acknowledge that, at present, publishers do have a legitimate interest in trying to maintain some control over the distribution of the articles for which they clearly hold the copyright. And I think that STM should be commended for trying to set up a collaborative process to come up with a consensus for what the appropriate norms of behavior around SCNs should be. My main question about the principles has to do with these academic groups. How common are they and how well defined? Is this notion of an academic group fully developed enough that they can function efficiently within the SCNs? I’ve looked at the comments posted at http://www.stm-assoc.org/stm-consultations/scn-consultation-2015/ So far there isn’t much there. I hope that we will see a good number of thoughtful and useful comments posted there over the next few weeks. Scott T Scott Plutchak | Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies UAB | The University of Alabama at Birmingham The Edge of Chaos – LHL 427 O: 205-996-4716 | M: 205-283-5538 http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4712-5233 uab.edu ******** From: Ann Okerson <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 10:54 PM I second Anthony's comments about Fred Dylla's deep commitment to dialog. Fred is extraordinary in so many ways. But I'm puzzled about the intent of this initiative; it's hard to tell exactly what it's trying to do and what problem it's trying to solve. Three possibilities came to mind: 1. Scholars and researchers are hampered from scholarly sharing of their and their colleagues' works, and the wish is to help them to share without worrying that they shouldn't be doing this. (If this is the case, we in libraries don't encounter such fears.) 2. It would be interesting to learn how much work is being shared among scholars in their networks and communities. (Possibly, but then why should we try to shape the way in which different scholarly/research communities do this, which seems to be asked for, by creating principles and asking for signatures.) 3. A number of folks read this initiative as paving the way to regulating and monetizing scholarly sharing. (Maybe this is a cynical interpretation, but it's not an illogical one.) Several colleagues who might like to submit comments are not quite sure what they'd be commenting about, as the purpose of this initiative isn't clear -- or perhaps it feels inherently contradictory. Insights would be appreciated. Ann