[GOAL] House of Lords open access enquiry: my response

[Heather Morrison]

My response is posted here:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/01/uk-house-of-lords-short-enquiry-into.html

Highlights

The long-term leadership of the UK and the House of Lords in open  
access is acknowledged and applauded. It is recommended that  
researchers always be required to deposit work in UK based  
repositories, even when publishing work in open access venues, to  
ensure that UK funded research never becomes unavailable or  
unaffordable to people in the UK.

My research delves into mapping open access with the Creative Commons  
licenses, finding that, despite superficial similarities, the CC  
licenses are useful tools but no CC license is synonymous with open  
access and each license element has both useful and negative  
implications for scholarship. For example, allowing derivatives and  
commercial uses to anyone downstream will not always be compatible  
with research ethics requirements. A participant in a weight loss  
study giving permission to use a photo for a scholarly journal cannot  
be assumed to have granted permission for anyone to use this photo in  
a commercial advertisement. I recommend replacing the requirement that  
funded articles use the CC-BY license with a statement that when RCUK  
funds for open access publishing are used, there should be no  
restrictions placed on educational or research uses of the works.

As an open access advocate, I recommend against block funding for open  
access article processing fees, as this will interfere with the  
market, raising prices that will result in loss of support for this  
approach outside the UK, disadvantaging the very publishers who think  
that this approach will benefit them. Instead, I recommend that the UK  
follow the policies of the U.S. National Institutes of Health and  
Canada’s Canadian Institutes of Health Research in allowing  
researchers to use their research grants to pay open access article  
processing fees.

I suggest providing some funding to provide infrastructure and support  
and/or subsidies to assist scholarly society publishers, a common  
practice at university libraries throughout North America, and I  
further recommend that the UK set aside some seed funding to fund the  
future, that is, the next generation of scholarly communication,  
overlay journals built on institutional repositories, an area where  
the UK is well positioned to play a leadership role.

Finally, I present some data of relevance to the question of maximum  
permissible embargoes before works can be made open access. It can be  
argued that a new norm of scholarly journals providing free back  
issues on a voluntary basis, typically within a year of publication,  
has emerged in the past ten years. This is such a widespread and  
growing practice that the lack of evidence of harm to these journals  
is in itself evidence that a one-year’s embargo causes no harm to  
journals relying on subscriptions, even when all articles in the  
journal are made freely available. Therefore I suggest that it would  
be quite appropriate to set a maximum embargo of no more than one year  
regardless of discipline. Thank you very much for the opportunity to  
participate in this consultation.

best,

Heather Morrison, PhD
Freedom for scholarship in the internet age
https://theses.lib.sfu.ca/thesis/etd7530