[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?

[Marcin Wojnarski]

Thanks, Heather, for this explanation.
Yes, I agree that OA archiving shall be an important part of the system, 
no matter what specific OA license is being used, for the preservation 
of scholarship independently of the fate or misdoings of a given publisher.

As to the dangers of commercial exploitation of CC-BY articles: can you 
point to a specific case of an article that was exploited in this way, 
causing harm to the authors?

You're right that re-selling of CC-BY papers is legally possible, but it 
seems unlikely to me. "Selling" is not as easy as it sounds - in order 
to sell, there must be somebody who wants to buy. Why would anyone want 
to pay for a paper which is elsewhere available for free?

Best,
Marcin


On 01/27/2013 12:18 AM, Heather Morrison wrote:
> hi Marcin,
>
> On 26-Jan-13, at 9:09 AM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote:
>
>> Heather,
>> I'm curious about your final note that CC-BY is not advisable for 
>> humanities. Why is it so? What's so different in HSS publications 
>> compared to, say, biology or mathematics where CC-BY is a "gold 
>> standard"? What other license is most recommended in humanities? Thanks.
>
> Thank you for raising the question, Marcin. I do not agree that CC-BY 
> is, or ought to be, a gold standard for publication in any discipline. 
> While CC-BY superficially appears to be the embodiment of the BOAI 
> definition of open access, a careful reading of the legal code 
> (recommended, it's not that long) illustrates that they are not the 
> same. For example, none of the CC licenses are specific to open access 
> in the sense of "free of charge". CC-BY is a weak and problematic 
> license for open access. It is a means by which a licensor can waive 
> certain rights under copyright which places no obligation at all on 
> the licensor. I can post a CC-BY work today - behind a paywall, if I 
> like - then tomorrow take it down and replace it with the same work 
> except All Rights Reserved. This is one of the reasons why I consider 
> it unwise to pursue open access publishing without open access 
> archiving. That is, if all of the articles published as open access 
> are archived in repositories (preferably more than one), this is a 
> much more sustainable open access scenario than open access publishing 
> on its own.
>
> Because of the weakness of CC-BY, I do not recommend this license for 
> journals or authors. If a few journals use this approach this is much 
> less problematic than if it becomes a standard. For example, if all of 
> the works in PubMedCentral were CC-BY, then a commercial company could 
> copy the entire database in order to sell it (behind a paywall if they 
> like, as CC-BY does not prohibit this) and then lobby the U.S. 
> government to eliminate funding for the public version produced by the 
> NIH. Currently, the fact that the NIH policy only covers public access 
> (fair use), not CC-BY, means that there is no incentive for a company 
> to do this. If in the future the works in PMC are covered by different 
> licenses it will be more difficult to duplicate the whole than it 
> would be if most or all of the works were CC-BY. If all of the 
> articles in PMC are in different PMC international archives, then 
> ongoing OA is more secure. Similarly, if all of the articles in PMC 
> are also available through the author's institutional repositories, 
> then even a commercial PMC takeover assuming all works are CC-BY could 
> be countered effectively through this other source.
>
> In addition to the dangers of CC-BY as a default for open access, for 
> many disciplines there are other reasons why CC-BY can be problematic. 
> CC-BY is sometimes incompatible with research ethics. This is likely 
> not a concern for mathematics, but will be a major concern in some 
> areas of social sciences and humanities. For example, Sage publishes 
> two journals in the areas of action research / participatory action 
> research. In this type of research, the researcher acts as a 
> facilitator and consultant; the actual research leadership as well as 
> most of the content is provided by the participants. With this kind of 
> research, it is not ethical for the researcher to give away rights to 
> use the results for commercial purposes to any 3rd party with no 
> requirement to seek permission. This is what CC-BY does. Those who 
> advocate for CC-BY like to point to the positive potential for 
> scholarship, but we need to keep in mind that CC-BY allows a 
> commercial company to do things like take photos from scholarly 
> articles and put them in image databases to sell for commercial 
> purposes to whoever will pay the price. It is good to see that OASPA 
> is now recognizing this issue by indicating that not all elements of a 
> CC-BY article need be CC-BY (see the latest GOAL post by OASPA on 
> this). Note that I am not convinced that it is ethical to give the 
> results of this kind of research to a commercial company to sell for 
> their own profit, regardless of the license used; this is contrary to 
> the spirit of this whole type of research.
>
> In many areas of the social sciences and humanities, precise 
> expression is important to the author. This may be a very different 
> situation from biology and mathematics. When words are changed in a 
> derivative, this can impact both the meaning and the author's 
> reputation if a derivative is cited. CC-BY allows for derivatives and 
> requires attribution - which means that an author could be incorrectly 
> cited for a derivative work. The possibility of inaccuracy in 
> derivatives and subsequent citation of derivatives is an element that 
> biologists and mathematicians might want to consider before adopting 
> CC-BY as a standard.
>
> Finally, it is premature to say that CC-BY is considered a standard by 
> any discipline. Most publishing in virtually every field is still toll 
> access. Most OA journals don't use CC licenses at all, and those that 
> do don't necessarily use CC-BY. It is true that a few large publishers 
> use CC-BY and advocate for this as a standard. However, I argue that 
> size does not define the best approach. It is highly likely that the 
> number of scholars at a small journal that does not use CC-BY 
> represents the same number of scholars giving serious thought to 
> licensing questions as were involved at the larger publishers.
>
> For more detail please see my blogpost, "a simple definition for open 
> access: a proposal to open the discussion". I argue that part of the 
> problem is actually the BOAI definition, and it might be better to 
> abandon this in favour of Suber's brief definition: "Open-access (OA) 
> literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most 
> copyright and licensing restrictions"
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/01/a-simple-definition-for-open-access_8.html 
>
>
> best,
>
> Heather Morrison
> The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com≠
>

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Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIT
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