[GOAL] Scopus and gold OA: open2closed, is this what we want?

[Heather Morrison]

Elsevier's for-pay Scopus service includes "More than 20,000 peer-reviewed journals, including 2,800 gold open access journals" from: http://www.elsevier.com/online-tools/scopus/content-overview

14% of the journal content for this commercial toll access service comes from gold OA.

When OA advocates insist on granting blanket commercial rights downstream, is this the kind of future for scholarly communication that is envisaged, one that takes free content licensed CC-BY or CC-BY-SA and locks it up in service packages for sale for those who can pay?

One of the visions of the original Budapest Open Access Initiative is that OA will  "share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich". I argue that if the poor are convinced or coerced to give away their work for blanket commercial rights downstream and the result is services like Scopus, this is a much more straightforward sharing of the poor with the rich. A researcher in a developing country giving away their work as CC-BY gets the benefit of wider dissemination of their own work, but may be shut out of services like Scopus, the next generation of tools designed to advance research. 
BOAI: http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

Thanks very much to Elsevier, Scopus, and participating gold OA publishers for a great example of the downside of granting blanket commercial rights downstream.

best,

-- 
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca