[BOAI] Re: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Jean-Claude Guédon
jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca
Mon Sep 1 15:04:52 BST 2014
I would expect that most research, following in the scientific ethos
patterns unearthed a long time ago by R. K. Merton, would strive for
prestige, authority and visibility rather than money (directly -
indirectly the first three terms will eventually translate into money
anyway). This is what Merton called "disinterestedness". If I place my
research in OA with a CC-by licence (or license, as the case may be),
this is because I seek maximum visibility. If someone reproduces my
CC-by work and sells it, it does not remove any visibility away from my
OA work, quite the contrary. So, I am all for someone working hard to
promote my work while making a few coins out of this effort. I never
expected to make money from a research article in the first place.
As for "owners of rights", i.e. publishers after the transfer of rights
customary in publishing contracts, that is another matter. This is a
business, and little else. Publishers are anything you want except
researchers (with few exceptions, and I distinguish carefully publishers
from editors here).
--
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal
Le lundi 01 septembre 2014 à 13:40 +0100, Prof. T.D. Wilson a écrit :
> 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
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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