[GOAL] Re: CC-BY and - or versus - open access

[Heather Morrison]

Jan,

It is really good to hear that we agree that authors should deposit their articles even when publishing in an open access journal.

There are a variety of reasons why publishers might change their practices over time. As you may be aware, there are instances where open access journals have converted to toll access; this is not common, but it does happen. This could happen because the publisher found that they did not get sufficient revenue from the OA business model that they chose, or it could happen if a journal changes hands from a publisher committed to open access to another with no such commitment.

The practices of open access publishers with a real commitment to open access, such as the OA publishing pioneers Public Library of Science and BioMedCentral, may or may not be copied by later entrants to open access publishing. Remember that many traditional publishers have been lobbying hard against open access for many years, and continue to do so. Even Springer, now owner of BMC and with some interesting and apparently serious open access initiatives of its own, freely admits that they are also lobbying against open access policy. When the NIH Public Access Policy was introduced in 2004 without a strong mandatory requirement, the initial compliance rate was only 4%. This illustrates that there are many publishers that will take advantage of any loophole that they can find. If open access policies narrowly define open access as CC-BY, there are loopholes, big ones, and I would expect to see instances of CC-BY publishing that do not at all resemble the publishing practices of PLoS or BMC.

Consider Elsevier's "universal access" (which I interpret as "who needs open access? all we need is the whole world to buy our stuff") and "sponsored access" pseudo-OA. If Elsevier felt compelled by OA policy-makers to use the CC-BY license, what might an Elsevier version of CC-BY look like? 

IF an OA policy merely stated "funded research must be published CC-BY", then technically a publisher could hit "publish" a toll-access version with a ludicrous price that no one would pay but with a CC-BY license, then almost immediately withdraw in favour of a toll access copy. This scenario is so obviously not in the spirit that I very much doubt a publisher would use this approach - not for philosophical reasons, but rather because it would be subject to challenge almost immediately. However, if we think the goal is "to publish CC-BY", this would fit the bill.

best,

Heather Morrison

On 2012-08-22, at 9:52 AM, Jan Velterop wrote:

> Heather,
> 
> What possible motive could a publisher have to act according to the scenario you sketch? Spite? Some wicked pleasure in frustrating the hell out of his authors? They could go out of business, that's true. Oh, and repositories could be discontinued and closed, too, of course. How is this all different for CC-BY compared to CC-BY-NC, or even to Public Domain material? 
> 
> Most publishers that I know who publish with CC-BY also deposit the articles, often in more than one repositories. Authors can – and should – always deposit their articles and at least keep copies so that in the extremely unlikely event of their CC-BY articles not being available anywhere, not even from Mendeley, or LOCKKS, or national libraries, they could still deposit them. Scepticism regarding the benefits of CC-BY is wholly unwarranted in the context of open access. 
> 
> Jan Velterop
> 
> On 22 Aug 2012, at 18:28, Heather Morrison wrote:
> 
>> Thanks, Marc and Jan.
>> 
>> I'd like to repeat this for emphasis, from the CC-BY legal code thanks to Marc: "Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time".
>> 
>> Comment: a publisher can publish a work as CC-BY (which does not require open access), then change license terms or simply stop redistributing the work at any time. If someone has a copy of the work while distributed as CC-BY, then they can make this open access. However, this only works if someone does have a copy and the means and will to redistribute for open access. This is why a CC-BY licensed article disseminated via one (or preferably more) open access archives is a much more secure situation for open access than publishing CC-BY.
>> 
>> best,
>> 
>> Heather Morrison
>> 
>> On 2012-08-22, at 8:47 AM, Couture Marc wrote:
>> 
>>> Jan Velterop wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> a (c) licence can only ever be changed from less open/less liberal to 
>>>> more open/more liberal; otherwise the user/reader can always claim to 
>>>> have read/used/distributed under the previous licence or not being 
>>>> aware of the new licence.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> I completely agree. And the user would not even have to claim ignorance of a new licence. As I pointed out before, CC licences' legal code states that they are "perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright)", and that should the copyright holder change the licence terms at some time, the original licence would remain in force:
>>> 
>>> "[...] Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such election will not serve to withdraw this License (or any other license that has been, or is required to be, granted under the terms of this License), and this License will continue in full force and effect unless terminated as stated above [i.e. in case of a breach of the terms of the licence by the user (section 7a)]."
>>> 
>>> (CC Attribution 3.0 Unported legal code, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode, section 7b).
>>> 
>>> Marc Couture
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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>> 
>> 
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