[GOAL] Open access publishing: current issues in copyright and licensing

[Heather Morrison]

I've started a post on the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics to record some of the current issues in copyright and licensing I notice as we gather data for the May 2015 OA APC survey.

The first set of issues, illustrated by the journal Advances in Electrical and Computer Engineering, are:

Issues

	• copyright transfer
	• posting final PDF to repository explicitly forbidden
	• DOAJ indicates CC-BY-NC-ND while the journal site indicates All Rights Reserved 

Comments

This is far from optimal open access. I can understand why pushing for a CC-BY default would be tempting as a solution. But would a more liberal CC license solve these problems? This is less clear. If a journal requires author copyright transfer, there can be a license agreement between author and publisher that limits the rights of the author. If the publisher holds the copyright, the publisher can change the license or transfer the journal to another publisher that uses a different license. 

DOAJ indicates that this journal is CC-BY-NC-ND, however I see no indication on the journal website that this license is used. It is possible that the journal changed policy at some point in time, in which case this information may have been correct when it was entered, and may be correct for some of the content in the journal, but not for articles published today. Indicating licensing at the journal level is not the simple solution that it might seem.

Details and excerpts from the publisher's website:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2015/05/open-access-publishing-current-issues.html

I won't post every instance, just wanted to highlight that there are issues like these and further research into practices and policy analysis would be helpful.

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