[GOAL] Re: libre vs open - general language issues

[Heather Morrison]

hi Nicolas,

It is a very good thing to see that works of scholars whose careers are ended are being made freely available online; thanks for your efforts on the Gilbert and other digithèques.

My question for you, if the authors have passed away and the heirs are not interested in exploiting copyright, why would you use a CC-BY-SA license instead of speeding up the process of moving the works to the public domain?

I seem to recall other instances of works actually in the public domain where people have put restrictions on the works after digitizing them. The intentions may well be liberal licensing, but this practice actually supports expansion of copyright into perpetuity - close to the opposite of open.

The opposite of open access, I argue, is closure of our access to knowledge. Evidence suppressed by government fiat; documents shredded to prevent anyone from seeing them; libraries and archives burned; censorship; closure of opportunities to learn. On a continuum from closed to open access, perpetual copyright is close, but not at the extreme end of the continuum.

This is important because we need open access not only to today's knowledge, but also to yesterday's knowledge. Historical works need to be digitized and made freely available; not just ancient history, also the issues of many scholarly journals just over a decade old have yet to be digitized.

These questions to me illustrate why it is timely for a broader conversation on the meaning of various aspects of open access. To go back to Nicolas' question about using the term "libre", I would suggest that we need to consider that scholarly knowledge can involve a great many different types of data for which the concept of "libre" in terms of re-use has very different social implications. The term "libre" may well be useful; my question is whether insisting on libre as concept is always in the best interests of OA.

For example, I re-use and greatly appreciate the freely available downloadable metadata from DOAJ and PubMedCentral in my research. I can download the files and conduct some analyses that may be useful to a number of people, including sometimes the data creators themselves. This is a good example of the kind of re-use I think we all want to encourage.

On the other hand, the use of Virgin Mobile of the photo of a young girl inappropriately released under a CC-BY license in an advertising campaign is a good illustration of the dangers of blanket downstream re-use rights. For details, see Lessig's post on the topic:
http://www.lessig.org/2007/09/on-the-texas-suit-against-virg/

In some disciplines, it is possible that almost all potential re-uses have little or no potential negative social impacts. In other disciplines, such as education and social work, it is common for the vast majority of data to be gathered under conditions requiring very careful attention to protecting the confidentiality of the people that are studied. Here, the potential for re-use may exist, but needs much more thought and research so that we can achieve the benefits without unduly exposing people to potential harms. 

There are scholars whose work intersects the arts for whom copyright is an important consideration for financial reasons, e.g. people who teach and research in areas like fine arts and theatre. There may be public good arguments for strong libre open access where there is full funding; however, there is often little to no funding in the arts and humanities, and where available it may cover only artist's actual expenses, and/or the artist may be only a part-time professor and rely on copyrighted work for the rest of their living.  

These disciplinary differences are likely underlying some of the controversy in this area among open access advocates. I think that some of the debates we should have been having over the years have not been had in the early years due to a need to fight for OA per se. My sense is that it is now timely to have these broader discussions. 

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