Say I wanted to data mine 10,000 articles. Â I'm at a university, but I am
co-funded by a pharmaceutical company and there is a possibility that the
research that I'm doing may result in a new drug discovery, which that company
will want to take to market. Â The 10,000 articles are all 'open access', but
they are under CC-BY-NC-SA licenses. Â What mechanism is there by which I can
contact all 10,000 authors and gain permission for my research?
David
Â
David C Prosser PhD
Executive Director, RLUK
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7848 2737
Mob: +44 (0) 7825 454586
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On 14 Mar 2012, at 16:40, Heather Morrison wrote:
Following are my comments to the RCUK open access consultation.Â
Dear RCUK Open Access Policy group,
First of all let me say congratulations and thank you to RCUK for your
continuing inspiring leadership on open access policy. Following are my
comments, based on many years of experience in open access policy
advocacy, my work as a professional librarian and adjunct faculty at the
University of British Columbia's School of Library, Archival and
Information Studies, where I have developed and taught courses on
scholarly communication, and my doctoral studies (communications, in
progress) in the area of scholarly communication and open access.Â
Overall, from my perspective this draft policy introduces two important
innovations: reducing the permitted embargo period, and pushing towards
libre open access (e.g. allowing use for data and text-mining). In brief,
I recommend strengthening the language on shortening embargo periods, and
eliminating reference to CC-BY in favor of broader language against
restrictions and requiring formats usable for text and data-mining
purposes. Also, I recommend that the policy specify immediate deposit,
with optional delayed release to accomodate the permitted embargoes.
With respect to the embargo period, I recommend strengthening the language
indicating that any permitted embargo periods are designed as a temporary
measure to give publishers time to adjust to an open access environment,
with a view to eventually requiring open access immediately on
publication. This language can be found on page 4, I recommend including
this in the introductory language to underscore this point.
Kudos to RCUK for adopting a leadership position on libre open access.
 However, I would recommend against specifying the Creative Commons CC-BY
license. While many open access advocates understandably see CC-BY as the
expression of the BOAI definition of open access, my considered opinion is
that CC-BY is a weak license for libre OA which fails to protect OA
downstream and will not accomplish the Budapest vision of open access,. My
perspective is that the best license for libre open access is Creative
Commons - Attribution - Noncommercial - Sharealike (CC-BY-NC-SA), as this
protects OA downstream (recognizing that the current CC NC definition is
problematic, and noting that commercial rights should be retained by
authors, not publishers). As one example of where open access might need
such protection, because CC-BY allows for resale of open access materials:
if all of PubMedCentral were CC-BY, a commercial company could copy the
whole thing, perhaps add some value, and sell their version of PMC. They
could not legally stop PMC from providing free access. However, I very
much doubt that CC-BY could prevent such a company from lobbying to remove
funding for the public version. If this sounds ludicrous and
unconscionable, may I present as evidence that just such a scenario is
realistic: 1) the efforts a few years ago by the American Chemical Society
to prevent the U.S. government from providing PubChem on the grounds that
this was competition with a private entity; 2) the Research Works Act, and
3) the current anti-FRPAA lobbying in the U.S., which, similarly to the
Research Works Act, claims that published research funded by the public is
"private research works" which should belong solely to the publisher.
Another reason for avoiding CC-BY is that while the contributions of
funders are very important, so are the contributions of scholar authors.
Many scholars do not wish to see others who have contributed nothing to a
scholarly work sell their work and pocket the money; I certainly don't.
For example, Peter Suber recently posted this note to the SPARC Open
Access Forum which expresses the distress of an author who published CC-BY
in a BMC journal and then found a bogus publisher selling her article
for$3. https://groups.google.com/a/arl.org/group/sparc-oaforum/browse_thread/threa
d/fc977cabd0d59bcc#. Â The more work that is published CC-BY, the more I
believe we can expect to see this kind of scam, and this risks turning
researchers off OA. Also, when faculty members develop their own open
access policies (e.g. Harvard, MIT), they insist that articles not be sold
for a profit. Links to these and other institutional repositories are
available through the Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies
(ROARMAP) at http://roarmap.eprints.org/.
To illustrate how CC-BY does not necessarily result in the Budapest open
access initative's vision of "sharing of the poor with the rich and the
rich with the poor": those who give away their work for commercial
purposes may not be able to afford the results. For example, if a scholar
from a poorer area gives away their medical articles as CC-BY, images and
other elements from these articles could be used to develop point-of-care
tools that could be sold at prices that the health care professionals
serving the scholar and their families could not afford. That is, despite
the best of intentions, CC-BY could easily result in a one-way sharing of
the poor with the rich. This is one of the reasons why I strongly
recommend that the developing world avoid CC-BY.
I cover this topic in more depth in the third chapter of my draft thesis -
from the link below, search for open access and creative commons:
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/chapter-3-open-access-as-solution-to-
the-enclosure-of-knowledge/
For practical reasons, to further text and data-mining I would suggest
that the article format is more to the point than licensing. An author's
final manuscript may be more likely to meet this requirement than the
so-called "Article of Record". For example, an author's own version in an
open format that allows for text and data-mining, with no licensing
language, is much better for text and data-mining purposes than a
publisher's "Article of Record" in a locked-down PDF format with a CC-BY
license. My recommendation is to specify useable format rather than
license. Also, I would recommend against encouraging deposit of the
"Article of Record", as scholarly communication needs to evolve beyond the
print-based journal article format, and this specification may tend to
further entrench a system that needs some shaking up. Â
Regarding p. 5 - working with individual institutions to develop open
access funds from indirect costs - good!!! I recommend looking at the
Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity
http://www.oacompact.org/compact/Â for guidance, and for institutions to
join. When such funds are developed, it is very important to build in
efficiencies to prevent against double dipping, avoid paying excessive
costs, and planning for education about the growing pool of open access
scam companies is an area that is growing in importance. I differ from
some of my colleagues in recommending against funding agencies paying OA
article processing fees.
What RCUK might want to consider if, similar to North America, some of the
publishers experiencing difficulty transitioning are the smaller society
publishers, is a journal subsidy program. Canada's Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council has such a program, called Aid to Scholarly
Journals. If RCUK does not yet have such a program, that would make it
much easier to start up with stronger OA expectations than SSHRC has been
able to do to date. Canada also has a program to help scholarly journals
transition to the online environment called Synergies which is a good
model. In North America, most academic libraries nowadays are providing
journal hosting and support services. This sector is by far the most
efficient in scholarly publishing, with costs on average less than 10% of
the current system. See chapter 4 of my draft thesis for
detailshttp://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/chapter-4-economics-of-scholarly-comm
unication-in-transition/).
Finally, a minor point: the introductory paragraph, talking about benefits
of open access, appears to prioritize business interest. I fully agree
that scholarship and open access to scholarship is a huge potential
benefit to business, but would submit that this is not, nor should it be,
the main point of scholarship and research. May I suggest that the final
sentence of the first paragraph refer to the public first and foremost,
and then perhaps speak to business benefits?
Many thanks for the opportunity to comment, and best wishes to RCUK in the
next stage of your leadership on OA policy.
Heather Morrison
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
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