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

[Jan Velterop]

On 13 Oct 2014, at 15:29, Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca> wrote:

> 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?

I'm not defending their pricing, but you're wrong, Heather, in saying that they "lock it up in service packages for sale for those who can pay". 'Locking up'? That would mean that nobody would be able to get to the articles anymore without paying. None of that is the case, whatsoever. And CC-BY would even make locking up – if it were possible at all – illegal.

> 
> 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.

"Giving away their work for blanket commercial rights" is exactly what happens in the toll-access subscription system! In OA it's sharing with everybody. EVERYBODY. And that naturally includes commercial entities. And if you want to proscribe commercial use, don't focus on the large publishers, but rather on the small-time entities who sell cheap printed versions for use in the classroom in areas where there's no meaningful internet. Profit-spite will hurt them, and students dependent on that material, immeasurably more than it could ever hurt large publishers.

> 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. 

Shut out of? How so? Scopus is not in the business of delivering journal content. It delivers a reference service. OA articles are included. Those who sell compressed air in cylinders don't 'lock up' or 'shut out' the atmosphere and prevent you from breathing freely. OA is the 'knowledge-sphere' (noösphere). Nobody is excluded. Not even those who capture the noösphere in cannisters, and sell those for easy ingestion.

> 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
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal