[BOAI] Re: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

[Prof. T.D. Wilson]

The issue has not just arisen.  There was a debate about it on this forum
when the idea of a SPARC award of some kind was mooted.  I and others
pointed out that the CC BY criterion would be a licence for others to
benefit financially from OA without any recompense to the copyright holder.
 I haven't seen much since about that award, perhaps it died the death?

Tom Wilson


On 1 September 2014 09:40, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder at cantab.net>
wrote:

> Paul Royster 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
>
>
>
>
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-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
T.D. Wilson, PhD (Sheffield), PhD, h.c.(Gothenburg), PhD, h.c.(Murcia),
Professor Emeritus, University of Sheffield
Publisher and Editor in Chief: Information Research
http://informationr.net/ir/
E-mail: t.d.wilson at shef.ac.uk <wilsontd at gmail.com>
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