Following are my comments to the Research Councils U.K. on the their proposed new open access policy
Dear RCUK Open Access Policy group,
First
of all let me say congratulations and thank you to RCUK for your
continuing inspiring leadership on open access policy. Following are my
comments, based on many years of experience in open access policy
advocacy, my work as a professional librarian and adjunct faculty at the
University of British Columbia's School of Library, Archival and
Information Studies, where I have developed and taught courses on
scholarly communication, and my doctoral studies (communications, in
progress) in the area of scholarly communication and open access.
Overall,
from my perspective this draft policy introduces two important
innovations: reducing the permitted embargo period, and pushing towards
libre open access (e.g. allowing use for data and text-mining). In
brief, I recommend strengthening the language on shortening embargo
periods, and eliminating reference to CC-BY in favor of broader language
against restrictions and requiring formats usable for text and
data-mining purposes. Also, I recommend that the policy specify
immediate deposit, with optional delayed release to accommodate the
permitted embargoes.
With respect to the embargo period, I
recommend strengthening the language indicating that any permitted
embargo periods are designed as a temporary measure to give publishers
time to adjust to an open access environment, with a view to eventually
requiring open access immediately on publication. This language can be
found on page 4, I recommend including this in the introductory language
to underscore this point.
Kudos to RCUK for adopting a leadership
position on libre open access. However, I would recommend against
specifying the Creative Commons CC-BY license. While many open access
advocates understandably see CC-BY as the expression of the BOAI
definition of open access, my considered opinion is that CC-BY is a weak
license for libre OA which fails to protect OA downstream and will not
accomplish the Budapest vision of open access,. My perspective is that
the best license for libre open access is Creative Commons - Attribution
- Noncommercial - Sharealike (CC-BY-NC-SA), as this protects OA
downstream (recognizing that the current CC NC definition is
problematic, and noting that commercial rights should be retained by
authors, not publishers). As one example of where open access might need
such protection, because CC-BY allows for resale of open access
materials: if all of PubMedCentral were CC-BY, a commercial company
could copy the whole thing, perhaps add some value, and sell their
version of PMC. They could not legally stop PMC from providing free
access. However, I very much doubt that CC-BY could prevent such a
company from lobbying to remove funding for the public version. If this
sounds ludicrous and unconscionable, may I present as evidence that just
such a scenario is realistic: 1) the efforts a few years ago by the
American Chemical Society to prevent the U.S. government from providing
PubChem on the grounds that this was competition with a private entity;
2) the Research Works Act, and 3) the current anti-FRPAA lobbying in the
U.S., which, similarly to the Research Works Act, claims that published
research funded by the public is "private research works" which should
belong solely to the publisher.
Another reason for avoiding CC-BY
is that while the contributions of funders are very important, so are
the contributions of scholar authors. Many scholars do not wish to see
others who have contributed nothing to a scholarly work sell their work
and pocket the money; I certainly don't. For example, Peter Suber
recently posted this note to the SPARC Open Access Forum which expresses
the distress of an author who published CC-BY in a BMC journal and then
found a bogus publisher selling her article for $3. https://groups.google.com/a/arl.org/group/sparc-oaforum/browse_thread/thread/fc977cabd0d59bcc#.
The more work that is published CC-BY, the more I believe we can expect
to see this kind of scam, and this risks turning researchers off OA.
Also, when faculty members develop their own open access policies (e.g.
Harvard, MIT), they insist that articles not be sold for a profit. Links
to these and other institutional repositories are available through the
Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) at
http://roarmap.eprints.org/.
To illustrate how CC-BY does not
necessarily result in the Budapest open access initative's vision of
"sharing of the poor with the rich and the rich with the poor": those
who give away their work for commercial purposes may not be able to
afford the results. For example, if a scholar from a poorer area gives
away their medical articles as CC-BY, images and other elements from
these articles could be used to develop point-of-care tools that could
be sold at prices that the health care professionals serving the scholar
and their families could not afford. That is, despite the best of
intentions, CC-BY could easily result in a one-way sharing of the poor
with the rich. This is one of the reasons why I strongly recommend that
the developing world avoid CC-BY.
I cover this topic in more depth
in the third chapter of my draft thesis - from the link below, search
for open access and creative commons:
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/chapter-3-open-access-as-solution-to-the-enclosure-of-knowledge/
For
practical reasons, to further text and data-mining I would suggest that
the article format is more to the point than licensing. An author's
final manuscript may be more likely to meet this requirement than the
so-called "Article of Record". For example, an author's own version in
an open format that allows for text and data-mining, with no licensing
language, is much better for text and data-mining purposes than a
publisher's "Article of Record" in a locked-down PDF format with a CC-BY
license. My recommendation is to specify useable format rather than
license. Also, I would recommend against encouraging deposit of the
"Article of Record", as scholarly communication needs to evolve beyond
the print-based journal article format, and this specification may tend
to further entrench a system that needs some shaking up.
Regarding
p. 5 - working with individual institutions to develop open access
funds from indirect costs - good!!! I recommend looking at the Compact
for Open Access Publishing Equity http://www.oacompact.org/compact/
for guidance, and for institutions to join. When such funds are
developed, it is very important to build in efficiencies to prevent
against double dipping, avoid paying excessive costs, and planning for
education about the growing pool of open access scam companies is an
area that is growing in importance. I differ from some of my colleagues
in recommending against funding agencies paying OA article processing
fees.
What RCUK might want to consider if, similar to North
America, some of the publishers experiencing difficulty transitioning
are the smaller society publishers, is a journal subsidy program.
Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has such a
program, called Aid to Scholarly Journals. If RCUK does not yet have
such a program, that would make it much easier to start up with stronger
OA expectations than SSHRC has been able to do to date. Canada also has
a program to help scholarly journals transition to the online
environment called Synergies which is a good model. In North America,
most academic libraries nowadays are providing journal hosting and
support services. This sector is by far the most efficient in scholarly
publishing, with costs on average less than 10% of the current system.
See chapter 4 of my draft thesis for details http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/chapter-4-economics-of-scholarly-communication-in-transition/).
Finally,
a minor point: the introductory paragraph, talking about benefits of
open access, appears to prioritize business interest. I fully agree that
scholarship and open access to scholarship is a huge potential benefit
to business, but would submit that this is not, nor should it be, the
main point of scholarship and research. May I suggest that the final
sentence of the first paragraph refer to the public first and foremost,
and then perhaps speak to business benefits?
Many thanks for the opportunity to comment, and best wishes to RCUK in the next stage of your leadership on OA policy.
Heather Morrison
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
