[GOAL] Re: OASPA Members Show Continued Growth in OA articles published with a CC BY license

[Heather Morrison]

Thank you for the numbers Claire and kudos to OASPA and its members - it is refreshing to see a strong open access publishing community. 

Critique

It is important for OA advocacy to understand that OASPA is an organization composed of publisher members who have their own business interests. The emphasis on open-access only journals and journal-wide CC licenses illustrates the problem. There are still journals publishing in print and/or print and online. The majority of the world's peer-reviewed journals have a history that predates Creative Commons licensing; for these journals, journal-wide CC licenses would be difficult or impossible to achieve. In some ways, OASPA acts as a lobby organization for born-digital, born-open-access journals. That's fine. Everyone has a right to represent their own interests. However, it is important for everyone, especially OASPA members, to understand that this is what OASPA is doing, at least some of the time.

My perspective is that the larger the corpus of CC-BY licensed works and the easier it is to identify them (e.g. if a robot can crawl the journals listed on DOAJ, search the metadata and retrieve all CC-BY items), the stronger the temptation is for the downstream commercial use actively invited by CC-BY licenses. CC, unlike OA, is not limited to works that are free-of-charge. Downstream services can be toll-access. For example, there is nothing in CC licenses that says that downstream users have to make their works reasonable available to those who made the original works possible. A downstream point-of-care health tool that draws from the CC-BY licensed works of medical researchers and funders in the developing world can be priced out of reach of the people in the developing world.

A bit more on IJPE:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2015/05/growth-in-cc-by-numbers-and-critique.html

best,

Heather Morrison


On 2015-05-20, at 6:14 AM, Claire Redhead wrote:

> The latest post on the OASPA blog shows the growth of CC BY articles in open access-only journals using data supplied by OASPA members up to the end of 2014.  All of the figures are available for download which includes information on other licenses and on open access articles published by OASPA members in hybrid journals.
> 
> This year we are also pleased to be able to include data showing growth of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).
> 
> See http://oaspa.org/growth-of-oa-only-journals-using-a-cc-by-license/.
> 
> -- 
>  
> Claire Redhead
> Membership & Communications Manager
> Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA
> http://oaspa.org/
> 
> 
> 
> 
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