[GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group

Fri Sep 13 16:04:36 BST 2019

Following is some background on the Canadian context that may be helpful to some readers.

One of the Canadian copyright collectives, Access Copyright, has proposed a tariff (like a tax, something one is obliged to pay), for 2014 - 2017 of $35 per FTE students or $25 for colleges. For a university like mine with about 40,000 students, that's $1.4 million dollars per year. What does this get us? Examples of rights are the right to copy up to 10% of a work and up to 20% in course content. This is absurd in the context where most works are purchased in electronic form under negotiated license agreements. There are strong arguments that what is covered is under fair dealing and/or licenses and in many cases is less rights than we have under current licenses.

Links to the propose tariff from here: https://www.accesscopyright.ca/educators/access-copyright-proposed-post-secondary-tariffs/

The model is based on print. The idea was that a university that paid for a single print book could not make and distribute copies to every student in a class without paying royalties. This model does not make sense when universities are paying, usually at a premium, for site-wide access for all students and staff.

The model also assumes that there are a group of entities, publishers and authors, who create works and that universities are the consumers. As a number of people pointed out in the latest Canadian copyright consultation, university faculty and students are the largest group of creators in the country, and we generally give away our work. uO students have made more than 10,000 theses open access through our institutional repository so far this decade. If the point is to direct $ to creators of copyrighted works, universities should receive cheques not invoices.

This model also assumes a static and (to me) outdated approach to teaching, passive textbook and lecture style. In active learning, students are expected to do research, write, share their works via blogs, student journals, Wikipedia etc.

This may help to explain why universities are avoiding the license in spite of the risk of expensive litigation, and why I suggest that a voluntary $181 USD fee for re-use of 5 figures is, in comparison, a model of transparency and a bargain.

Copyright collectives are organizations that have a particular approach and culture. People in other countries may find their local collectives easier to work with.

Authors, publishers, and teachers do need to use works that are under copyright, sometimes in ways that go beyond fair use / fair dealing. Open licensing simplifies matters for some works, but not all works are, or ever will be, openly licensed. An organization like CCC makes it possible to find out who owns the rights and obtain permission. This saves time and sometimes makes to possible to re-use works when otherwise the use would be abandoned due to the complexity of finding copyright owners and negotiating use.

best,

Heather Morrison
________________________________
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org <goal-bounces at eprints.org> on behalf of Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>
Sent: Friday, September 13, 2019 8:20:52 AM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal at eprints.org>
Subject: Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group

Thank you, the Cell example is helpful.

If you look up Cell on Sherpa Romeo you will see that authors can self-archive their preprint on noncommercial servers such as arXiv and bioRxiv at no cost and with no delay: https://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php?source=journal&sourceid=6580&la=en&fIDnum=|&mode=simple

In brief: this is what I recommend to authors and funders.

Details:

Relyx (Elsevier's parent company) is a corporation with a mandate to return profit to shareholders. In the case of Cell, revenue and profit is derived from selling the journal through subscriptions and selling re-use rights. For-profit scholarly publishers by definition must make a profit.

181 USD for the use of 5 figures is a model of transparency and a bargain in comparison with legally obligatory non-transparent blanket licensing as Canada's copyright collectives are demanding for limited rights that might not cover this case.

If the figures are in an arXiv version and the downstream author cannot afford the 181 USD, they can cite the arXiv version at no cost. There is a small cost in inconvenience, but no loss of knowledge.

Elsevier appears to be interpreting NC as necessary to their downstream commercial re-use rights. This is a matter of interpretation. NC/ND with author copyright means authors retain these rights, not publishers.  CC licenses with no NC grant blanket commercial rights to anyone. Under CC-BY for example, anyone could charge whatever they like for the 5 figures. Whether they could do this through CCC per se depends on CCC policy and practice, not the license. With blanket downstream commercial rights, anyone can set up a for-pay image database.

My recommendation: authors of Cell articles should self-archive preprints for open access and take advantage of pre-submission peer review (a community practice in arXiv) in order to post a preprint that has been peer reviewed. For the future: further develop this model and eliminate the role of the for-profit publisher.

I do not recommend paying for Elsevier postprint OA under any license. Their use of NC and ND is problematic. but so is their use of CC-BY.

best,

Dr. Heather Morrison
Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa
Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa
Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project
sustainingknowledgecommons.org
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca
https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706
[On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020]
________________________________
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org <goal-bounces at eprints.org> on behalf of Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2019 5:02:15 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal at eprints.org>
Subject: Re: [GOAL] Call for applications - International Open Access Advisory Group

Attention : courriel externe | external email
Typical example,
Skimmed through Cell to the first CC - NC - ND article:

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.05.055

Copyright
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc.
User License
Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/> |
How you can reuse<https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30626-9#> [Information Icon]

Go to RightsLInk
Enter as academic author writing a book with CUP and requiring 5 figures.
CCC requires me to pay 181 USD to Elsevier / CCC
Try it yourself

It's irrelevant in practice who s the copyright owner , the total transparency is that Elsevier can extort rent for all CC -NC they pubish even if the author has copyright.
Transparency = daylight robbery

--
"I always retain copyright in my papers, and nothing in any contract I sign with any publisher will override that fact. You should do the same".

Peter Murray-Rust
Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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