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

Mon Sep 1 20:08:46 BST 2014

What re-use means for scholarly journal articles? Right to re-print?
Right to re-distribute? These are unnecessary. We need access rights
and data mining rights.

Re-use is meaningful for research data, for figures, but not for
articles. The information in the articles could be re-used, we need
no special rights for that. Articles could be used for scientific,
educational purposes, that is granted by fair use. Excerpts could be
cited. And why redistribute, if the article is freely available?

Andras Holl

On Mon, 1 Sep 2014 12:52:57 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote
> On Sep 1, 2014, at 11:19 AM, Stephen Downes <stephen at DOWNES.CA> wrote:
> 
> > Some really important discussion here. In particular, I would argue (with 
this article) that  the insistence on CC-by (which allows commercial reuse) 
comes not from actual proponents of open access, but by commercial publishers 
promoting their own interests. http://www.downes.ca/post/62708
> 
> Actually, it’s much more complicated than that. Journal publishers 
> (both commercial and learned-society) have conflicts of interest 
> with Green OA -- both Gratis (free for all online) and Libre (free 
> for all online plus re-use rights, especially commercial re-use 
> rights).
> 
> And, on top of that, there are impatient researchers militating 
> uncompromisingly for Libre OA in certain fields that would 
> especially benefit from Libre OA re-use rights.
> 
> And there are the Gold OA publishers that want to promote their 
> product by lionizing the benefits of Libre OA and deprecating Gratis 
> OA, whether from author self-archiving (Gratis Green) or rival Gold 
> OA  and hybrid publishers (Gratis Gold).
> 
> And often, alas, the library community, including SPARC, does not 
> understand either, and needlessly complicates things wtill further.
> 
> Let me simplify: Libre OA (free for all online plus re-use rights) 
> is Gratis OA (free for all online) PLUS re-use rights. Libre OA asks 
> for MORE than Gratis OA. Hence Libre OA faces far more obstacles 
> than Gratis OA.
> 
> Yet we are nowhere near having even Gratis OA yet: Around 30% in 
> most fields, especially during the first 12 months of publication 
> (mainly because of publisher embargoes — on Gratis OA — but also 
> because of (groundless) author fears).
> 
> That’s why Gratis Green OA mandates are urgently needed from 
> institutions and funders, worldwide.
> 
> Once we have 100% Gratis Green OA globally, all the rest will come: 
> Fair-Gold OA and all the re-use rights researchers want and need.
> 
> But as long as we keep fussing and focussing pre-emptively and 
> compulsively on Libre OA re-use rights (and Fool’s Gold OA) instead 
> of mandating Gratis Green, we will keep getting next to no OA at all,
>  of either kind, as now.
> 
> And all it requires is a tiny bit of thought to see why this is so. 
> (But for some reason, many people prefer to fulminate instead, about 
> the relative virtues of Gratis vs Libre, Green vs Gold, and CC-BY vs 
> non-commercial CC-BY.)
> 
> Let’s hope that the institutions and funding agencies will get their 
> acts together soon. At least 20 years of OA have already been 
> needlessly lost…
> 
> Dixit,
> 
> Stevan Harnad
> Exceedingly Weary Archivangelist
> 
> > From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:JISC-
REPOSITORIES at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Richard Poynder
> > Sent: September-01-14 8:20 AM
> > To: JISC-REPOSITORIES at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> > Subject: The Open Access Interviews: Paul Royster, Coordinator of 
Scholarly Communications, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
> >  
> > 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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Andras Holl / Holl Andras                e-mail: holl at konkoly.hu
Konkoly Observatory / MTA CsFK CsI       Tel.: +36 1 3919368 Fax: +36 1 
2754668
IT advisor / Szamitastechn. koordinator  Mail: H1525 POBox 67, Budapest, 
Hungary
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