[GOAL] Re: What is the GOAL?

David Prosser david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk
Wed Apr 8 17:47:21 BST 2015 

Hi Heather

OK, so let’s take your specific example.  Every open access paper in PMC is mirrored in Europe PubMed Central.  So our publisher not only has to get PMC switched off, but Europe PMC as well.  Oh, and PMC Canada.  I suspect that the moment that it is suspected that any publisher is trying to get all three sites shut down, through a massive lobbying operation on multiple national governments and private trusts (the funders of the three sites), somebody (and I would put money on Peter Murray Rust being first in line) will download the entire corpus and make it available.  And there is nothing anybody can do to stop that somebody.

The danger is greater when the CC-BY license is in the hands of a company that holds some or all of the rights under copyright. For example, if a fee is paid to Elsevier, Wiley, etc. to publish a work as CC-BY, there is nothing in the CC-BY license per se that would prevent the companies from reverting to All Rights Reserved or other more restrictive licenses. This could happen even if the author retains copyright, because author copyright retention can co-exist with transfer of virtually all rights to a publisher (some license-to-publish approaches are very much like this). Authors could in theory negotiate publishing contracts to prevent this; but don't expect the industry to develop this.

Is this true?  Legal experts will need to help me, but looking at the current CC-BY code I note (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode):


Section 2 – Scope.

  1.  License grant.
     *   Subject to the terms and conditions of this Public License, the Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license to exercise the Licensed Rights in the Licensed Material to:
        *   reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part; and
        *   produce, reproduce, and Share Adapted Material.

Once the paper has been offered under a CC-BY license that license is ‘irrevocable’.  Does ‘irrevocable’ not mean what I think it does?  Further, also under Scope:


  *   5. Downstream recipients.
     *   Offer from the Licensor – Licensed Material. Every recipient of the Licensed Material automatically receives an offer from the Licensor to exercise the Licensed Rights under the terms and conditions of this Public License.
     *   No downstream restrictions. You may not offer or impose any additional or different terms or conditions on, or apply any Effective Technological Measures to, the Licensed Material if doing so restricts exercise of the Licensed Rights by any recipient of the Licensed Material.

5.B means again, once issued under a CC-BY license you can’t add new licensing terms on top.

As I say, I’m not a licensing expert, but I can’t see the problem here.

David



On 8 Apr 2015, at 16:41, Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca<mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>> wrote:

David,

Thank you for your contribution. To summarize your argument, you are saying that CC-BY works cannot be enclosed because anyone can buy a copy and make it open access. Some flaws with this argument:

Practical: let's imagine that every article in every journal listed in PubMedCentral were licensed CC-BY. A company with a desire for profit-making copies the lot, develops a cool value-added service at an attractive price point, sells the package - and advertising, too. This is a success; people use and advertise in this service, which erodes support for PMC and the journals listed there. The company becomes annoyed with PMC - a free public service competing with the private sector - and lobbies, successfully, for the removal of funding for PMC. Assuming all the articles remain CC-BY, yes, anyone could buy them up and make the works open access again - but the company can set the price. One could find other means to gather the articles; my advice is not to underestimate the work or cost.

CC-BY does not include any obligation for downstream users to use the same license. There is nothing to stop this company from changing the works to a more restrictive license. CC-BY-SA, in this sense, is a less dangerous license. This is not intended as an endorsement of CC-BY-SA for open access.

The danger is greater when the CC-BY license is in the hands of a company that holds some or all of the rights under copyright. For example, if a fee is paid to Elsevier, Wiley, etc. to publish a work as CC-BY, there is nothing in the CC-BY license per se that would prevent the companies from reverting to All Rights Reserved or other more restrictive licenses. This could happen even if the author retains copyright, because author copyright retention can co-exist with transfer of virtually all rights to a publisher (some license-to-publish approaches are very much like this). Authors could in theory negotiate publishing contracts to prevent this; but don't expect the industry to develop this.

Thanks again for your contribution and another example that we in the OA movement are not fully in agreement on all of the details. I hope this discussion is useful for those interested in developing best practices for OA implementation.

best,

Heather Morrison

On Apr 8, 2015, at 9:14 AM, "David Prosser" <david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk<mailto:david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk>> wrote:

Jeroen - CC-BY license

Heather - NO!!! the CC-BY license is a major strategic error of the open access movement. Allowing downstream commercial use to anyone opens up the possibility of re-enclosure. The temptation towards perpetual copyright for profit-taking should not be underestimated. Scholarly publishing is a multi-billion dollar industry (as well as a community effort relying largely on a gift economy), with some players earning profits in the millions (a billion for Elsevier), in the 40% profit range. There are other reasons to hesitate to use this license, but this is the one that OA advocates need to wake up and pay attention to.


I continue to be unable to grasp Heather’s argument.  If, for whatever reason, I purchase from you a CC-BY article I can, as it is CC-BY, make the article freely available.  I don’t see how CC-BY allows for re-enclosure when it contains within itself the ultimate enclosure-busting feature of allowing unlimited distribution provided there is attribution.

David

David C Prosser PhD
Executive Director, RLUK

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7862 8436
Mob: +44 (0) 7825 454586
www.rluk.ac.uk<http://www.rluk.ac.uk>

RLUK Twitter feed: RL_UK
Director's Twitter feed: RLUK_David

Registered Office: Senate House Library, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Registered Company no: 2733294
Registered Charity no: 1026543

On 8 Apr 2015, at 02:08, Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca> wrote:

Surely everyone on this list is aiming for the goal of global open access! But what do we think this means? Thanks to Jeroen for posting recently his wish list. In this post, I will point out how very different my perspective on open access is from Jeroen's, even though I think Jeroen and I are both fully in favour of global open access and transformative rather than traditional approaches. The purpose of this post is to suggest that the open access movement has now reached a point where it is useful to have such discussions about the specifics of where we think we should be heading. In addition to differences in individuals' perspectives, it seems quite likely that there will be disciplinary differences as well.

Jeroen's post can be found here:
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2015-April/003154.html

Following is Jeroen's wish list items followed by my perspectives.

Jeroen - fully Open Access
Heather: yes, of course!

Jeroen - online only
Heather - OA works can be online only, but should not be restricted in this manner

Jeroen - CC-BY license
Heather - NO!!! the CC-BY license is a major strategic error of the open access movement. Allowing downstream commercial use to anyone opens up the possibility of re-enclosure. The temptation towards perpetual copyright for profit-taking should not be underestimated. Scholarly publishing is a multi-billion dollar industry (as well as a community effort relying largely on a gift economy), with some players earning profits in the millions (a billion for Elsevier), in the 40% profit range. There are other reasons to hesitate to use this license, but this is the one that OA advocates need to wake up and pay attention to.

I have written about this in my Creative Commons and Open Access Critique series: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/10/critique-of-cc-by-series.html
and I will be speaking on this topic next week in Washington at the Allen Press' Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing Seminar:
http://allenpress.com/events/2015seminar

Jeroen - authors retain copyright
Heather - this doesn't really mean very much. With the subscription publishers' trend towards license-to-publish, author copyright retention is the norm, but the licenses themselves can be virtually identical to full copyright transfer.

Jeroen - maximum APC of 500 USD (or perhaps a lifetime membership model like that at PeerJ)
- APC waivers for those who apply (e.g. from LMI countries)
Heather - robust system of OA publishing that does not rely on APCs. Firmly opposed to using research funds for APCs. Cancel the high-priced bundles of the big commercial scholarly publishers first, then use the savings to pay for OA.

Jeroen - really international profile of editors/board (far beyond US/UK/CA/AU/NL/DE/CH/NZ/FR)
Heather - this makes more sense in some areas than others. There is universal knowledge (think physics principles) and local knowledge (consider Québec politics). There are advantages to regionally based publishing. These include the financial advantages of paying local rates in one's own currency and generating local jobs, and the community advantages of working with people you have a reasonable expectation of getting to know, who are based at institutions you know something about. I think that journal "white lists" are best handled locally. There is Qualis in Brazil (I gather), although this might need some cleaning up. In Canada we have a scholarly journal publishing subsidy program which involves peer review at the journal level.

Jeroen - no issues: continuous publishing
- in principle no size restrictions
Heather: agreed.

Jeroen- using ORCID and DOI of course
Heather: NOT signing up for an ORCID. On purpose!! ORCID and DOI may have their usefulness, but neither is essential to open access.

Jeroen- peer review along PLOS One idea: only check for (methodological) soundness (and whether it is no obvious garbage or plagiarism), avoiding costly system of multiple cascading submissions/rejections
Heather: this is most attractive for larger publishers with multiple journals, i.e. authors should submit once and then the filter of top journal can be applied or not.  Another approach is transferring reviews.

Jeroen - post pub open non anonymous peer review, so the community decides what is the worth of published papers
Heather - an interesting experiment, this may work better for some communities than others

Jeroen - peer review reports themselves are citable and have DOIs
Heather - possibly interesting, but it is not clear whether all peer reviewers will be honest without blind peer review. The author of an article you are reviewing could show up someday on a hiring committee, tenure and promotion committee, or fund proposal review committee.

Jeroen- making (small) updates to articles possible (i.e. creating an updated version)
- making it easy to link to additional material (data, video, code etc.) shared via external platforms like Zenodo or Figshare
Heather - agreed, but preferred additional platforms are institutional and disciplinary archives.

Jeroen - no IF advertising
- open for text mining
Heather - sort of agreed, although changing reliance on IF needs to happen at tenure and promotion committees. There is no point is asking journals not to advertise something that makes them look good.

Jeroen - providing a suite of article level metrics
Heather - a) optional and b) dead set against article level metrics being used for evaluation purposes. Why? Most importantly, metrics are the wrong approach altogether. Truly pioneering work (e.g. Mendel on genetics) is often not appreciated when it is first published. Then, too, altmetrics have not been tested. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that altmetrics based on social media will tend to reflect and amplify social biases (e.g. the works of articles that seem to be written by men would be more likely to be tweeted than those that seem to be written by women), effects of popularity (unless we all agree that the most important research topic of the future is internet cats?), and subject to deliberate manipulation. For example, consider how companies that prefer to deny climate change science could hire people to distort social media to increase the "alt-merit" of their preferred research and researchers.

Jeroen - using e.g. LOCKSS or Portico for digital preservation
Heather - preservation is the responsibility of archives and libraries; pushing this to journals unnecessarily increases the costs of publication. I am opposed for this reason.

Jeroen -  indexing at least by Google Scholar and DOAJ, at a later stage also Scopus, Web of Science and others
Heather - where indexing is important will depend on the discipline. NOT Scopus, because they are owned by Elsevier and I am boycotting Elsevier. Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science are all indexes owned and controlled by large corporations. I argue that we need public indexes controlled by scholars.

Jeroen - optionally a pre-print archive (but could rely on SSRN as well)
Heather - open access archiving is primary, should be mandatory, and should be the sole focus of almost all open access policies (the only exception being internal policies of publishers, which will naturally focus on publishing). Pre-prints, post-prints and research data should all be in institutional repositories and copied (easily and seamlessly) to disciplinary repositories wherever this makes sense (or vice versa; the point is the more copies the better to ensure ongoing open access and preservation.

Finally, there are somewhere around a million scholars around the world, and others besides scholars who should be part of this discussion. I don't think it is up to either Jeroen or I, or both of us together, to decide on the future of open access and/or scholarly communication. This should be a broader conversation.

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


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

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

More information about the GOAL mailing list