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

[Heather Morrison]

Thank you Peter.

For the benefit of others, I would like to highlight that this is an argument for open licensing for free use of scholarly works for commercial advertising purposes.

I argue that this is highly problematic from the perspective of moral and economic rights. If blanket free use for commercial advertising is permitted by open licensing, this applies to many other situations besides pharma promotion, such as weight loss or health supplement social media advertising. This might conflict with the moral rights of human research subjects, authors and funders, and CC does provide some possible remedies. However, it is easier to avoid this by not using open licensing than hiring a lawyer and pursuing moral rights after the harm is done.

In this case, CCC would be doing a disservice if the only consideration were economic rights. I don't know if this is the case.

>From an economic perspective, advertising is one potential source of income for open access publishers. This is a potential for small not-for-profit journals, not just Elsevier. Until we have a good stable source of income for such journals, it is best for the economic sustainability of open access to reserve commercial rights.

Whether free use of material for pharma promotion is or should be a goal of open access is a separate question that I set aside for now to focus on the fact that blanket downstream rights are by definition not limited to one industry. I do note since we started this conversation with transparency that no pharma company has yet spoken up about their own use and expectations.

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: Friday, September 13, 2019 1:00:50 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


On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 5:33 PM Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca<mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>> wrote:
Peter (or others).

You refer to pharma companies paying tens of thousands of dollars to re-use open access works. Can you explain / provide examples? If works are free-to-read, even with All Rights Reserved copyright, pharma companies and their researchers can read and benefit from knowledge produced to date to further knowledge at no cost.

See https://twitter.com/petermurrayrust/status/1172554433202458625?s=20 6000 USD for re-use of figures from an NC Cell article in pharma promotion. This is not "voluntary" I have said quite enough on this. If anyone cares about price-gouging by publishers feel free to re-use my tweet under CC BY.

--
"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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