PLoS ONE is in the lead...but could a well thought out noncommercial approach give a competitor an edge?

PLoS ONE has often been the source of attention on IJPE and elsewhere, becoming in 2010 the world's largest journal then doubling in size in 2011, publishing close to 14,000 articles that year.  No wonder PLoS ONE is leading the new tendency to competition in open access, attracting a number of clones.

No doubt many a competitor is wondering how they'll ever get a edge when PLoS ONE is so far ahead - that's my guess as to why Mary Anne Liebert is starting out by providing free publishing services. 

So here is a thought - could  a well thought out noncommercial approach give a publisher an edge over PLoS ONE, with its insistence that all authors accept the CC-BY license? There just might be something to this. My own perspective is that as an open access advocate of course I want to freely share my work - but not for sale! My preference for including the noncommercial element in a CC license is by no means unusual - my understanding is that NC is the most popular of the CC elements. I've even been thinking that when I next get around to doing some writing to submit for publication, I just might go for Nature's Scientific Reports rather than PLoS ONE - much as I like PLoS and PLoS ONE, Nature will let me have my preferred NC license, and PLoS ONE won't.

When we scholars come up with our own open access mandates, sharing our work, "but not for a profit" is part of the deal, as illustrated by the leader with this approach, Harvard, and MIT. This kind of suggests that scholars don't want to give away their work to just anyone to sell for a profit, doesn't it?

So what would a good noncommercial policy look like? First of all, if authors are paying to make their work open access, then it should be open access, and the copyright (including any reserved commercial rights) should belong to the author. This would protect the publisher from having a competitor take their whole journal and use it for commercial purposes that would undermine the working publisher's revenue streams, while making it clear to authors and funders alike that the purpose is not to sneak in other enclosures for the purpose of making more profits.

This is a concept I am just starting to explore. Comments are welcome, via email at hgmorris at sfu dot ca. This post is part of the Articulating the Commons series.

Copyright remains yours? better read the fine print

This statement about author copyright from the IOS Press Author Copyright Agreement page is an excellent example of why scholarly authors should beware the phrase "copyright remains yours", and read the fine print. What IOS Press is saying is that copyright remains yours, but you may not give your work away. To post your own work in an open access archive, you must pay! Otherwise, others must pay for your work. Educational use at your own institution is okay, but any other educational institution must pay IOS Press - and notice that they are not telling the author how much they are charging. For some examples of just how much this practice costs educational institutions, please see my recent posts open access to save costs for teaching and learning and selling out feminism: 100 copies for $3,607. I highly recommend avoiding publishers with such policies. Scholars, let us not give such publishers our work as authors, reviewers, or editors. 

Excerpt from the IOS Press Author Copyright agreement:

Copyright remains yours, and we will acknowledge this in the copyright line that appears on your article. You also retain the right to use your own article (provided you acknowledge the published original in standard bibliographic citation form) in the following ways, as long as you do not sell it in ways that would conflict directly with our efforts to disseminate it.

1. You are free to use the manuscript version of your article for internal, educational or other purposes of your own institution or company;
2. You may use the article, in whole or in part, as the basis for your own further publications or spoken presentations;
3. For a fee of €100, you will have the right to mount the final version of your article as published by IOS Press on your own, your institution’s, company’s or funding agency’s website. You can order this right together with the final published version of your article with the form sent to the corresponding author along with the proofs of your paper.

What Authors Want: To Retain Copyright

Sally Morris (former Executive Director of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, ALPSP) quotes a major ALPSP study of more than 11,000 authors, published in 1999, What Authors Want, as finding that more than half of authors wanted to retain copyright, rather than relinquishing their copyright to publishers. One of the authors of the study, Alma Study, also refers to more authors wishing to retain than to relinquish copyright.

This is a study published in 1999 - more than two years before the initial Charter of Creative Commons, and long before today's Author's Rights Movement.

Sally's quotes can be found in her article, Authors and Copyright, Learned Publishing, Volume 13, Number 2, 1 April 2000 , pp. 75-76(2).

Sally Morris' article in Learned Publishing is free. The ALPSP study, however, is not. I wonder why?