Open access is in the process of transition from a toll access system that continues to yield enormous profits to a very few publishers at the expense of the rest of us. OA gains have been significant, but I do not think we should underestimate the temptation to revert to toll access. The SSRN sellout to Elsevier might be a good opportunity to consider how to develop open access policy to ensure that works that are made open access remain open access. Every potential approach has both strengths and weaknesses. I argue that a sustainable open access ecosystem needs to have redundancy built in. Copies of OA works should be in the institutional repository, every possible subject repository, as well as many research and national libraries around the world for safeguarding.
One of the potential vulnerabilities of institutional repositories is that institutions facing a budgetary crisis could be tempted to charge for access or to sell off the repository (or even the institution). The best policy to date to minimize this potential, in my mind, is the MIT faculty open access policy (acknowledging Harvard as the pioneer of this style of policy). Following is the relevant part of the text of the policy: "Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same”. from: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-access-at-mit/mit-open-access-policy/ The improvement over the Harvard policy is the specification that the articles are to be made available for the purpose of open dissemination. The reason that this is important is because specifying that the articles not be “sold for a profit” leads the door open for cost-recovery charges. Institutional cost-recovery could include paying a company that provides the service, e.g. Elsevier. If anyone is considering similar policy I recommend adding a clause stating “free of charge for the user” which is much clearer. If even a few large research libraries around the world were to regularly download and make accessible a mirror of the whole MIT open access repository, making good use of their downstream user rights, I submit that that would be a very robust system indeed to secure open access into the future. Thoughts? -- 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.morri...@uottawa.ca _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
