[GOAL] Re: Hybrid Open Access

[Graham Triggs]

On 18 December 2013 06:41, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> Not necessarily. It means that for any commercial use (and the CC
>> definition is subject to interpration), one has to obtain the permission of
>> the copyright owner, which may be the author, depending of the scope of the
>> license granted to the publisher.
>>
>
> This may be true in theory, but I have never heard of an *author*, at
> least in scientific disciplines, issuing a take-down notice or taking an
> exploiter to court. Please give counterexamples if they exist.
>

The publisher may be given (or rather, have requested) rights to police
copyright infringement on behalf of the author. You are probably right that
an author would not issue such a notice - certainly not to other scholars -
but the safest route is to simply request permission from the copyright
holder (author). It is similarly unlikely that they would refuse such
permission, and there is nothing an acting authority could do if you have
that permission.


> The exploitation is carried out by the *publisher* through CCC Rightslink.
> This does not involve the author (IMO it absolutely should) - it is a
> monopoly business carried out by the publisher. I would be amazed if 0.1%
> of authors understood they had handed over effective exploitation rights to
> CCC+publisher. CCC Rightslink nowhere mentions authors - this is why I use
> the word "irrelevant" - it only mentions the publisher, even where the
> copyright is still held by the author. In effect the publisher is
> exploiting the author without involving them.
>

The publisher may have rights to sell the content / re-sell commercial
rights. Such purchases may be unnecessary according to the licence a work
is distributed under, but it's not illegal (but false advertising of the
sale - such as incorrectly asserting who holds copyright - is).

But also, unless it is covered specifically by a licensing agreement
between the author and publisher (and what has been documented so far as an
"exclusive right to publish" probably isn't sufficient), then the copyright
holder is able to grant rights.

As for "exploitation"...


> I’m in the editorial board of an OA journal which uses -NC but doesn’t ask
>> authors to grant it a license, so the authors keep the exploitation rights.
>>
>>
> If you manage all permissions yourself then this may be true but I would
> need to see details - which Journal?.  If you involve CCC RightsLink I
> would be very surprised if the exploitation - including pricing - was not
> done by the publisher without reference to individual authors.
>
> And please reconsider NC. It does a lot of harm beyond the RightsLink
> stuff. It is not allowed by many funders and cannot be deposited in the
> Open Access subset of (Europe) PMC
>

I agree with you about the other problems about funders and OA subset.
However, let's just step back a minute and think about the bigger picture.

An -NC licence does not prevent any scholarly use of the content, which by
definition, would be non-commercial. It only covers commercial interests,
and purchasing those rights would come from private funds.

If an -NC licence allowed the authors (funders) to pay a lower APC, with
the balance expected to be made up from commercial sales to private funds,
then this would reduce the burden of publishing on the public purse, at no
harm to scholarly use.

Arguably, that could be considered a good thing. Although more likely it
would be seen that the public expenditure as an investment to allow
commercial use to drive economic growth outweighs the small cost difference.

G
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