[GOAL] Re: Is CC-BY analogous to toll access?

[Heather Morrison]

On 2013-03-14, at 12:09 PM, David Prosser wrote:

Surely this is a red herring.  Open access is about making the papers freely available, not about making any services that can be built on top of them freely (or 'cheaply', however we want to define 'cheaply') available.  If somebody can make a lot of money mining the literature and identifying the ten exactly apposite papers for the problem a pharmaceutical company is trying to solve then good luck to them!  The ten papers are still going to be open access.

Comment

This is just one example. To go back to my toll access analogy, that would be like saying: "So what if people can take a few scholars' papers and sell them. What can go wrong?" What can go wrong in the print world is that a few commercial scholarly publishers end up making a great deal of money and lobbying governments for policies and laws to protect their profits, even when this is contrary to the purposes of scholarship.

With respect to CC-BY as a default for scholarship: it's not just a few papers that can be found, mined or sold. The whole corpus could be sold, with value-added services available only to those willing to pay. A successful business using this approach might well be inclined to view the free versions as competition and lobby to remove their funding.

best,

Heather Morrison