[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price
Further down in this blogpost I commend the Nature Scientific Reports options. For further details and explanation of why I consider author choice to be optimal, see the blogpost. Author choice is absolutely fine if the author(s) 100% fully-funded the research they are reporting on. Although even then I would hope they would choose CC BY to maximise the re-use of their work. But this is not the case for the vast majority of papers published in STM (and perhaps even in HSS?). I strongly think the funder should be the one to choose, guide or even mandate the license by which the article is made available. This way the funder can maximise the dissemination potential and return-on-investment. Funders like RCUK have realised they need to do and so have mandated the CC BY license for all gold OA published research from 1st April this year. Good for them - the reasons for this are clear to me. I think more and more research funders will follow this mandate in the coming months and years. It is a privilege to be able to do research with public or charity money. I already get paid to do research. I do *not* need or want further payment for 'royalties' from further licencing for re-use of academic research I write. By blocking re-use of my research with modules such as ND I understand I would clearly be limiting the potential re-use value of my work. That many authors who publish in NPG Scientific Reports choose such an extremely restrictive license as CC BY-NC-ND shows to me that these authors don't particularly understand the negative consequences of their actions. Authors who choose to publish in NPG Scientific Reports are a self-selecting group anyhow and may not represent a 'general' sense of author behaviour - I would not ever choose to publish in this journal. There are many different publication outlets available. That authors choose Scientific Reports and not a similar megajournal such as PLOS ONE, suggests to me that this self-selecting group may be a more conservative type that are seeking to identify their work with the NPG 'brand' which in some circles equates with prestige. Put another way, if PLOS ONE offered this choice (not that they will, it would not be good for science to offer this choice) I doubt the results would be the same - people who publish in PLOS ONE tend to understand the reasons behind the need for open access re-use without permission a bit more. Best, Ross -- -/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/- Ross Mounce PhD Student Open Knowledge Foundation Panton Fellow Fossils, Phylogeny and Macroevolution Research Group University of Bath, 4 South Building, Lab 1.07 http://about.me/rossmounce -/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/- ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price
Following on from Heather's post, Nature Publishing Group can offer some more data on author choice of licenses on Scientific Reports. Since we introduced CC-BY as an option in July 2012, authors have chosen CC-BY on 5% of papers. 1 January 2011 to 30 June 2012 * Two license choices were available: CC-BY-NC-SA, CC-BY-NC-ND 532 papers accepted * 75% were CC-BY-NC-SA * 25% were CC-BY-NC-ND 1 July 2012 to 7 November 2012 Introduced CC-BY; Three license choices available 412 papers accepted * 37% were CC BY-NC-SA * 58% were CC BY-NC-ND * 5% were CC BY Order of the license on the rights form was: - CC BY-NC-SA - CC BY-NC-ND - CC BY We speculated that more authors might be choosing ND because it was the middle option listed on the form. On 8 November 2012, we released an updated form with the options reorganized. 8 November 2012 to 21 January 2013 273 papers accepted * 11% were CC BY-NC-SA * 83% were CC BY-NC-ND * 5% were CC BY Order on the rights form revised to: - CC BY-NC-ND - CC BY-NC-SA - CC BY in order of increasing permissiveness. Creative Commons language to explain what each license permits is included on the form next to the options. We will continue to monitor authors' preference, and it will be interesting to see if this pattern changes on 1 April when the revised RCUK and Wellcome Trust policies come into effect. To ensure we can meet the needs of funders and authors, we'll continue to offer a choice of licenses and are currently offering CC-BY licenses on 20 titles with open access options, with more journals to introduce the choice of CC-BY this year. Hoping this is of interest to this group. Best wishes, Grace Grace Baynes Head of Corporate Communications Nature Publishing Group The Macmillan Building 4-6 Crinan Street London, N1 9XW T +44 (0)20 7014 4063 F +44 (0)20 7843 4998 E g.bay...@nature.com www.nature.com Visit the NPG press room: www.nature.com/npg_/press_room/ DISCLAIMER: This e-mail is confidential and should not be used by anyone who is not the original intended recipient. If you have received this e-mail in error please inform the sender and delete it from your mailbox or any other storage mechanism. Neither Macmillan Publishers Limited nor any of its agents accept liability for any statements made which are clearly the sender's own and not expressly made on behalf of Macmillan Publishers Limited or one of its agents. Please note that neither Macmillan Publishers Limited nor any of its agents accept any responsibility for viruses that may be contained in this e-mail or its attachments and it is your responsibility to scan the e-mail and attachments (if any). No contracts may be concluded on behalf of Macmillan Publishers Limited or its agents by means of e-mail communication. Macmillan Publishers Limited Registered in England and Wales with registered number 785998 Registered Office Brunel Road, Houndmills, Basingstoke RG21 6XS ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price
I would be interested in who took the decision to offer a range or licences and whether this has had any consultation outside NPG. From my viewpoint I see it as a publisher taking unilateral decisions about the dissemination of knowledge without community involvement. NPG will (naturally) do what is best for NPG first and the community second. Has NPG followed any guidelines from independent bodies? -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price
To state the obvious: Nature is offering researchers the choice to make their own decision about a range of CC licenses. This is not a unilateral decision! On the contrary, it is publishers who offer only one choice (such as CC-BY) that are making a unilateral decision. As an open access advocate, I commend NPG for this decision. I recommend that publishers give authors the full range of CC licenses to choose from. This is the only CC license option consistent with an author's rights approach to scholarly communication. Cellular Therapy and Transplantation provides what I consider the optimal creative commons model for open access journals: CTT practices what I consider to be the optimal policy for an open access journal for CC licensing, requiring authors to use a CC license, but leaving copyright with the authors and allowing the author to select the CC license of their choice from among the full set of CC license options. From my blogpost, journals with good creative commons models: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2011/12/journals-with-good-creative-commons.html Further down in this blogpost I commend the Nature Scientific Reports options. For further details and explanation of why I consider author choice to be optimal, see the blogpost. best, Heather Morrison, PhD The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com On 5-Feb-13, at 12:37 PM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: I would be interested in who took the decision to offer a range or licences and whether this has had any consultation outside NPG. From my viewpoint I see it as a publisher taking unilateral decisions about the dissemination of knowledge without community involvement. NPG will (naturally) do what is best for NPG first and the community second. Has NPG followed any guidelines from independent bodies? -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 5:57 AM, Heather Morrison heath...@eln.bc.cawrote: On 28-Jan-13, at 8:24 PM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: Comment: I know how much you appreciate quantitative evidence, PMR, so here are some quick figures that suggest that scientists do very much want NC: These are not scientific observations - at best anecdotal. Nature's Scientific Reports provides an interesting case study. This journal is similar to PLoS ONE - except that they give authors their choice of CC licenses. I just checked the 8 journals on the front page of scientific reports, and here are the CC license choices of the scientists themselves: CC-BY-NC-ND: 6/8 or 75% CC-BY: 1/8 or 12.5% CC-BY-SA: 1/8 or 12.5% My understanding is that Nature charges more for CC-BY than CC-NC, in which case I hypothesize that price is the determining factor. A larger study would be useful - anyone interested? This is one of the advantages of the leaving the choice in the hands of the author. A quick glance at the DOAJ General Science list shows that about 20 of the 143 journals on this list use the NC element. This compares with about 19 journals on the same list using CC-BY. There is no evidence that this policy is set by scientists. I strongly suspect this is done at non-academic editorial level. I suspect that it is due to simplistic decision-making in the office. In several cases where I have pubklicly challenged editors on this they have changed their policy from NC to BY This means that scholars on editorial boards who are making decisions about gold open access publishing in the area of science are looking at the CC options and deciding that it makes sense to use noncommercial. Note that the majority in this sub-list still are not using CC licenses at all. The lack of knowledge in journals about licences is almost certainly an important factor. To summarize: there is evidence that given a choice, scientists tend to prefer CC licenses including the noncommercial element. There is no evidence to support this claim. This can only be established by a proper controlled study not assumptions from anecdotes. P. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with, profits - or too high a price?
I'd just like to add the point of view of the Living Reviews OA journals with an example why we currently argue in favor of CC-BY-NC. First, since not only Marcin Wojnarski doubts that anyone want to pay for a paper which is elsewhere available for free? Our long review articles would make perfect (text-)books if anyone could sell them without asking for publisher's or the author's permission. Example: The open access review The Post-Newtonian Approximation for Relativistic Compact Binaries (http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2007-2) was republished by Oxford UP as a major part of Equations of Motion in General Relativity (http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199584109.001.0001) in 2011. Original price at amazon.com: $98.50 for 156 pages! Of course, this example does not completely illustrate the possible misuse of CC-BY: here, the author agreed to the commercial reprint, and the original review was extended by other authors' contributions. However, they could have easily sold only the Futamase part as a book. With CC-BY, the publisher would not even have to ask the authors or original OA publisher for reprint permission. Moreover, the authors (who usually write time-consuming reviews in addition to their publicly funded research) would not financially benefit from this commercial reuse in any way. Therefore, our authors would object to Peter Murray-Rust, who has never met a scientist who has argued for CC-NC over CC-BY. In short, in a world where companies collate wikipedia articles and sell them on amazon, why wouldn't there be a marked for commercial OA reprints? (And, if someone wants to sell them, e.g., as book-on-demand, at least it should be the OA publishers and authors themselves...) Frank -- == Frank Schulz | Managing Editor Living Reviews BackOffice MPI for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) Am Muehlenberg 1 14476 Potsdam | Germany email: edito...@aei.mpg.de tel: +49 (0)331 567 7115 http://www.livingreviews.org == ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with, profits - or too high a price?
Dear Frank In short, in a world where companies collate wikipedia articles and sell them on amazon, Yes. Anyone can do this because wikipedia articles are openly licenced. This is a good thing. People are happy with paying for a hard (paper) copy of something. Printing on real paper, with real ink, and real delivery costs money. This is no bad thing. why wouldn't there be a market for commercial OA reprints? Indeed there probably is a market for paper copy OA reprints. There is nothing wrong with this. But instead of one company having a monopoly over the provision of these hard-copy reprints, perhaps it is fairer that the customer can choose which company prints a paper copy of this open material? They can choose the quality of print, the weight of the paper, and print-on-demand companies can compete to provide this service. (And, if someone wants to sell them, e.g., as book-on-demand, at least it should be the OA publishers and authors themselves...) Why? I don't understand this? I think anyone should be allowed to provide the service (printing). I don't see why one publisher, who may be very expensive, and poor quality, should be allowed a monopoly over printing academic material that is openly available on the internet. my $0.02 Ross -- -/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/- Ross Mounce PhD Student Open Knowledge Foundation Panton Fellow Fossils, Phylogeny and Macroevolution Research Group University of Bath, 4 South Building, Lab 1.07 http://about.me/rossmounce -/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/- ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
On 01/28/2013 10:44 PM, Heather Morrison wrote: Question: are you saying that allowing any third party to make use of a scholar's work to advertise their own products and/or to sell their advertising services is one of the reasons people are advocating for CC-BY? I don't know exactly why people are advocating for CC-BY. Maybe they realize that every website and every service needs some source of funding to survive, so if scholars want new - and free - academic services to appear on the web, there must be a way for these services to make a living, and allowing them to sell adverts is one of the ways to support them and let them survive. But maybe scholars don't want new services at all. Maybe they are perfectly fine with what exists today: Elsevier, Springer and the rest of mafia? In such case, -NC doesn't hurt indeed. Best, Marcin -- Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIT http://tunedit.org http://www.facebook.com/TunedIT http://twitter.com/TunedIT http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinwojnarski TunedIT - Online Laboratory for Intelligent Algorithms ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with, profits - or too high a price?
Frank, This is an interesting point and probably the first solid argument in favor of CC-BY-NC that I've heard. But I want to highlight a few circumstances that, in my opinion, make this case an exception rather than a rule. 1. The book - like most (or all?) academic books published for profit - was a _review_ of existing knowledge, not new original research. The paper was also a review, and the entire journal Living Reviews in Relativity is by definition devoted to review papers rather than original research. But: ~99% of other journals and papers are original research not reviews. Nobody would even consider them for inclusion in any book, because the results contained in them are too fresh, too narrow and not yet verified and established in a given discipline. 2. The journal has an exceptionally high impact factor and I guess it's one of the leading journals in your discipline. Again, ~99% of papers out there don't enjoy the benefits of such high impact factors and prestige of the journal, which means that their chances of being even considered for re-publication anywhere else are very low. The primary concern for 99% of authors is not too much interest in their papers, but too little interest, too few readers and too low dissemination. Best, Marcin On 01/29/2013 10:55 AM, Editor Living Reviews wrote: I'd just like to add the point of view of the Living Reviews OA journals with an example why we currently argue in favor of CC-BY-NC. First, since not only Marcin Wojnarski doubts that anyone want to pay for a paper which is elsewhere available for free? Our long review articles would make perfect (text-)books if anyone could sell them without asking for publisher's or the author's permission. Example: The open access review The Post-Newtonian Approximation for Relativistic Compact Binaries (http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2007-2) was republished by Oxford UP as a major part of Equations of Motion in General Relativity (http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199584109.001.0001) in 2011. Original price at amazon.com: $98.50 for 156 pages! Of course, this example does not completely illustrate the possible misuse of CC-BY: here, the author agreed to the commercial reprint, and the original review was extended by other authors' contributions. However, they could have easily sold only the Futamase part as a book. With CC-BY, the publisher would not even have to ask the authors or original OA publisher for reprint permission. Moreover, the authors (who usually write time-consuming reviews in addition to their publicly funded research) would not financially benefit from this commercial reuse in any way. Therefore, our authors would object to Peter Murray-Rust, who has never met a scientist who has argued for CC-NC over CC-BY. In short, in a world where companies collate wikipedia articles and sell them on amazon, why wouldn't there be a marked for commercial OA reprints? (And, if someone wants to sell them, e.g., as book-on-demand, at least it should be the OA publishers and authors themselves...) Frank -- Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIT http://tunedit.org http://www.facebook.com/TunedIT http://twitter.com/TunedIT http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinwojnarski TunedIT - Online Laboratory for Intelligent Algorithms ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
Some responses to PMR: Nature's Scientific Reports website lists just one fee for APFs, in different currencies - $1,350 in the Americas. There is no mention of differential pricing based on CC license choice. From: http://www.nature.com/srep/authors/index.html#costs Here is the advice given to authors about their licensing choices: Scientific Reports does not require authors of original (primary) research papers to assign copyright of their published contributions. Rather, authors can choose one of three licenses: the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license; the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license; or the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license. http://www.nature.com/srep/policies/index.html#license-agreement Nature is obviously going to some lengths to be transparent in their information to authors, so I will take it as a given that this journal does not charge more for CC-BY. My data sample of 8 articles on the Scientific Reports home page on the evening of Jan. 28, 2013 PST about 9:30 p.m. is a small sample, but it is data. With such a small sample it is difficult and unwise to draw much by way of conclusions, however this small sample is sufficient to conclude that at least some scientists, given the choice between CC-BY, CC-BY-NC-SA, and CC-BY-NC-ND with all other variables apparently equal, are choosing CC-BY-NC-ND. More research would be needed to establish the current preferences of scientists, and this real-world experimental situation where authors have the choice is useful for such research. With respect to who is making decisions about the CC licenses of journals listed in DOAJ: I have no information about who is making the decisions, regardless of what decision is being made. All I can say is that it appears that many fully open access journals, even in the sciences, either do not use CC licenses at all, or if they do, CC-BY is not the obvious and ubiquitous choice. best, Heather Morrison, PhD The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com On 2013-01-29, at 12:38 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 5:57 AM, Heather Morrison heath...@eln.bc.ca wrote: On 28-Jan-13, at 8:24 PM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: Comment: I know how much you appreciate quantitative evidence, PMR, so here are some quick figures that suggest that scientists do very much want NC: These are not scientific observations - at best anecdotal. Nature's Scientific Reports provides an interesting case study. This journal is similar to PLoS ONE - except that they give authors their choice of CC licenses. I just checked the 8 journals on the front page of scientific reports, and here are the CC license choices of the scientists themselves: CC-BY-NC-ND: 6/8 or 75% CC-BY: 1/8 or 12.5% CC-BY-SA: 1/8 or 12.5% My understanding is that Nature charges more for CC-BY than CC-NC, in which case I hypothesize that price is the determining factor. A larger study would be useful - anyone interested? This is one of the advantages of the leaving the choice in the hands of the author. A quick glance at the DOAJ General Science list shows that about 20 of the 143 journals on this list use the NC element. This compares with about 19 journals on the same list using CC-BY. There is no evidence that this policy is set by scientists. I strongly suspect this is done at non-academic editorial level. I suspect that it is due to simplistic decision-making in the office. In several cases where I have pubklicly challenged editors on this they have changed their policy from NC to BY This means that scholars on editorial boards who are making decisions about gold open access publishing in the area of science are looking at the CC options and deciding that it makes sense to use noncommercial. Note that the majority in this sub-list still are not using CC licenses at all. The lack of knowledge in journals about licences is almost certainly an important factor. To summarize: there is evidence that given a choice, scientists tend to prefer CC licenses including the noncommercial element. There is no evidence to support this claim. This can only be established by a proper controlled study not assumptions from anecdotes. P. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
Marcin, of course there is room for new services, particularly taking advantage of the potential of the internet, and at a quick glance, TunedIT looks promising. What I am wondering is why new services and companies should not build through voluntary participation rather than seeking public policy requiring scholars to make their work available for such purposes? I don't see a compelling public interest here, and I'm wondering if this is even a sound business strategy. Scholars are flocking to new services like Mendeley, Academia.edu, Research Gate, and Google Scholar because they find the services useful. best, Heather Morrison On 2013-01-29, at 5:08 AM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote: On 01/28/2013 10:44 PM, Heather Morrison wrote: Question: are you saying that allowing any third party to make use of a scholar's work to advertise their own products and/or to sell their advertising services is one of the reasons people are advocating for CC-BY? I don't know exactly why people are advocating for CC-BY. Maybe they realize that every website and every service needs some source of funding to survive, so if scholars want new - and free - academic services to appear on the web, there must be a way for these services to make a living, and allowing them to sell adverts is one of the ways to support them and let them survive. But maybe scholars don't want new services at all. Maybe they are perfectly fine with what exists today: Elsevier, Springer and the rest of mafia? In such case, -NC doesn't hurt indeed. Best, Marcin -- Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIT http://tunedit.org http://www.facebook.com/TunedIT http://twitter.com/TunedIT http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinwojnarski TunedIT - Online Laboratory for Intelligent Algorithms ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
Dear Heather. I believe PMR was referring to these 19ish Nature Publishing Group journals, which do explicitly charge higher for the CC BY licence http://rossmounce.co.uk/2012/11/07/gold-oa-pricewatch/ and as I've told you elsewhere, where open access journals use Creative Commons licences CC BY is by far the most common choice (whether you count that by publisher, journal OR article volume) Ross On 29 January 2013 17:47, Heather Morrison hgmor...@sfu.ca wrote: Some responses to PMR: Nature's Scientific Reports website lists just one fee for APFs, in different currencies - $1,350 in the Americas. There is no mention of differential pricing based on CC license choice. From: http://www.nature.com/srep/authors/index.html#costs Here is the advice given to authors about their licensing choices: Scientific Reports does not require authors of original (primary) research papers to assign copyright of their published contributions. Rather, authors can choose one of three licenses: the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license; the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license; or the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license. http://www.nature.com/srep/policies/index.html#license-agreement Nature is obviously going to some lengths to be transparent in their information to authors, so I will take it as a given that this journal does not charge more for CC-BY. My data sample of 8 articles on the Scientific Reports home page on the evening of Jan. 28, 2013 PST about 9:30 p.m. is a small sample, but it is data. With such a small sample it is difficult and unwise to draw much by way of conclusions, however this small sample is sufficient to conclude that at least some scientists, given the choice between CC-BY, CC-BY-NC-SA, and CC-BY-NC-ND with all other variables apparently equal, are choosing CC-BY-NC-ND. More research would be needed to establish the current preferences of scientists, and this real-world experimental situation where authors have the choice is useful for such research. With respect to who is making decisions about the CC licenses of journals listed in DOAJ: I have no information about who is making the decisions, regardless of what decision is being made. All I can say is that it appears that many fully open access journals, even in the sciences, either do not use CC licenses at all, or if they do, CC-BY is not the obvious and ubiquitous choice. best, Heather Morrison, PhD The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com On 2013-01-29, at 12:38 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 5:57 AM, Heather Morrison heath...@eln.bc.ca wrote: On 28-Jan-13, at 8:24 PM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: Comment: I know how much you appreciate quantitative evidence, PMR, so here are some quick figures that suggest that scientists do very much want NC: These are not scientific observations - at best anecdotal. Nature's Scientific Reports provides an interesting case study. This journal is similar to PLoS ONE - except that they give authors their choice of CC licenses. I just checked the 8 journals on the front page of scientific reports, and here are the CC license choices of the scientists themselves: CC-BY-NC-ND: 6/8 or 75% CC-BY: 1/8 or 12.5% CC-BY-SA: 1/8 or 12.5% My understanding is that Nature charges more for CC-BY than CC-NC, in which case I hypothesize that price is the determining factor. A larger study would be useful - anyone interested? This is one of the advantages of the leaving the choice in the hands of the author. A quick glance at the DOAJ General Science list shows that about 20 of the 143 journals on this list use the NC element. This compares with about 19 journals on the same list using CC-BY. There is no evidence that this policy is set by scientists. I strongly suspect this is done at non-academic editorial level. I suspect that it is due to simplistic decision-making in the office. In several cases where I have pubklicly challenged editors on this they have changed their policy from NC to BY This means that scholars on editorial boards who are making decisions about gold open access publishing in the area of science are looking at the CC options and deciding that it makes sense to use noncommercial. Note that the majority in this sub-list still are not using CC licenses at all. The lack of knowledge in journals about licences is almost certainly an important factor. To summarize: there is evidence that given a choice, scientists tend to prefer CC licenses including the noncommercial element. There is no evidence to support this claim. This can only be established by a proper controlled study not assumptions from anecdotes. P. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with, profits - or too high a price?
On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 9:55 AM, Editor Living Reviews edito...@aei.mpg.dewrote: Therefore, our authors would object to Peter Murray-Rust, who has never met a scientist who has argued for CC-NC over CC-BY. Now I have (assuming Frank Schulz is a practising scientist) . And I cannot understand his/MPG's reasons. In fact I hope this mail may convince him/them to change the strategy. I'd just like to add the point of view of the Living Reviews OA journals with an example why we currently argue in favor of CC-BY-NC. Actually the journal is not CC-BY-NC, it's CC-BY-NC-ND (no derivatives as well). First, since not only Marcin Wojnarski doubts that anyone want to pay for a paper which is elsewhere available for free? Our long review articles would make perfect (text-)books if anyone could sell them without asking for publisher's or the author's permission. Example: The open access review The Post-Newtonian Approximation for Relativistic Compact Binaries (http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2007-2) was republished by Oxford UP as a major part of Equations of Motion in General Relativity (http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199584109.001.0001 ) in 2011. Original price at amazon.com: $98.50 for 156 pages! This figures seems quite good value to me. I assume you get a bound paper book. But many scientific publishers charge 50 USD for a 1-day rental of a single article. Of course, this example does not completely illustrate the possible misuse of CC-BY: here, the author agreed to the commercial reprint, and the original review was extended by other authors' contributions. However, they could have easily sold only the Futamase part as a book. They didn't. They added significant value by (a) format and (b) aggregation. With CC-BY, the publisher would not even have to ask the authors or original OA publisher for reprint permission. Moreover, the authors (who usually write time-consuming reviews in addition to their publicly funded research) would not financially benefit from this commercial reuse in any way. I'm assuming your authors don't benefit financially at present. Therefore, our authors would object to Peter Murray-Rust, who has never met a scientist who has argued for CC-NC over CC-BY. Have you asked them in a controlled survey by an independent agent? In short, in a world where companies collate wikipedia articles and sell them on amazon, why wouldn't there be a marked for commercial OA reprints? (And, if someone wants to sell them, e.g., as book-on-demand, at least it should be the OA publishers and authors themselves...) First the MPG has stated: http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/mpg-open-access-policy/ The Max Planck Society and Open Access Financed by the national government and federal states, the Max Planck Society http://www.mpg.de/english/portal/index.html engages in basic research in the public interest. Making its scientists’ research findings available for the benefit of the whole of humanity, free of charge whenever possible (Open Access), is a key aspiration of the Society. In contrast you wish to restrict access to the science in your publications. You wish it to be controlled by you, and you don't want anyone else to receive money. I see your position as: * we have some form of ownership of the material and wish to control how it is used after we've published it * it is morally/ethically wrong for anyone to resell material which they got for free. I'll argue that you are actually *preventing* the dissemination of scientific knowledge. A third party P takes your material and resells it. The purchasers choose for whatever reason to buy from P rather than use your website for free. I can make speculations why. * they add value in the formatting * they add value by aggregation * they add value by enhanced discovery * they add content value In the current case I think it's all of these. But even if it wasn't it means: * more people will read and use the paper. * the paper will be cited more * your impact factor will increase. Suppose you write to your authors: Publisher P is reselling you article for money. As a result our impact factor has doubled and you have twice the number of citations. Do you wish us to take legal action against publisher P? I wonder if they would agree with you? Note also that publisher P is enhancing *your* market, not diminishing it. They are doing free advertising. They make your role more essential. You are not losing money by their activities - nor are your authors. If you feel so strongly, create a rival product that is better or cheaper. If it isn't worth your while, then they have justifiably created a new market. Note, by the way that *I* might have been interested in republishing your article (for free, but CC-BY) if you had not forbidden me. I am generally interested in mathematics in the scientific literature. My software can extract the equations from your article (this is not fantasy
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
On 2013-01-29, at 11:01 AM, Ross Mounce wrote: ...and as I've told you elsewhere, where open access journals use Creative Commons licences CC BY is by far the most common choice (whether you count that by publisher, journal OR article volume) Comment From Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter - as of May 2012: for present purposes we can say that roughly 88% of OA journals don't use CC-BY. For details and data, see the June 2012 SPARC Open Access Newsletter: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/06-02-12.htm Do you have any data to support your assertion that the majority of OA publishers use CC-BY? This strikes me as counter to logic. If less than 12% of OA journals use CC-BY and some of the larger OA publishers (with a number of journals each) use CC-BY, this suggests that the majority of OA publishers do not use CC-BY. Remember that PLoS + BMC / Springer + Hindawi = 3 publishers. If you have any actual data on article volume that would be helpful. In interpreting this data, it is important to take into account the total volume. When PLoS ONE became the world's largest journal a couple of years ago, publishing 14,000 articles in one year, that was remarkable, a real milestone for OA. But let's not forget that that 14,000 articles is still less than 1% of the approximately 1.5 million scholarly articles published in a year. For the future: now that PLoS ONE has a number of competitors, it will be interesting to see whether this pioneer retains this volume. If other publishers offer authors a choice of CC licenses, and not all authors prefer CC-BY, this could give PLoS ONE competitors a bit of an edge. best, Heather Morrison, PhD The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
My statement and Peter Suber's statement do not conflict. He said 'of all OA journals' Whilst I said 'of OA journals using creative commons licences' Both statements are thus correct On Jan 29, 2013 10:09 PM, Heather Morrison heath...@eln.bc.ca wrote: On 2013-01-29, at 11:01 AM, Ross Mounce wrote: ...and as I've told you elsewhere, where open access journals use Creative Commons licences CC BY is by far the most common choice (whether you count that by publisher, journal OR article volume) Comment From Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter - as of May 2012: for present purposes we can say that roughly 88% of OA journals don't use CC-BY. For details and data, see the June 2012 SPARC Open Access Newsletter: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/06-02-12.htm Do you have any data to support your assertion that the majority of OA publishers use CC-BY? This strikes me as counter to logic. If less than 12% of OA journals use CC-BY and some of the larger OA publishers (with a number of journals each) use CC-BY, this suggests that the majority of OA publishers do not use CC-BY. Remember that PLoS + BMC / Springer + Hindawi = 3 publishers. If you have any actual data on article volume that would be helpful. In interpreting this data, it is important to take into account the total volume. When PLoS ONE became the world's largest journal a couple of years ago, publishing 14,000 articles in one year, that was remarkable, a real milestone for OA. But let's not forget that that 14,000 articles is still less than 1% of the approximately 1.5 million scholarly articles published in a year. For the future: now that PLoS ONE has a number of competitors, it will be interesting to see whether this pioneer retains this volume. If other publishers offer authors a choice of CC licenses, and not all authors prefer CC-BY, this could give PLoS ONE competitors a bit of an edge. best, Heather Morrison, PhD The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
Thanks, Heather, for this explanation. Yes, I agree that OA archiving shall be an important part of the system, no matter what specific OA license is being used, for the preservation of scholarship independently of the fate or misdoings of a given publisher. As to the dangers of commercial exploitation of CC-BY articles: can you point to a specific case of an article that was exploited in this way, causing harm to the authors? You're right that re-selling of CC-BY papers is legally possible, but it seems unlikely to me. Selling is not as easy as it sounds - in order to sell, there must be somebody who wants to buy. Why would anyone want to pay for a paper which is elsewhere available for free? Best, Marcin On 01/27/2013 12:18 AM, Heather Morrison wrote: hi Marcin, On 26-Jan-13, at 9:09 AM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote: Heather, I'm curious about your final note that CC-BY is not advisable for humanities. Why is it so? What's so different in HSS publications compared to, say, biology or mathematics where CC-BY is a gold standard? What other license is most recommended in humanities? Thanks. Thank you for raising the question, Marcin. I do not agree that CC-BY is, or ought to be, a gold standard for publication in any discipline. While CC-BY superficially appears to be the embodiment of the BOAI definition of open access, a careful reading of the legal code (recommended, it's not that long) illustrates that they are not the same. For example, none of the CC licenses are specific to open access in the sense of free of charge. CC-BY is a weak and problematic license for open access. It is a means by which a licensor can waive certain rights under copyright which places no obligation at all on the licensor. I can post a CC-BY work today - behind a paywall, if I like - then tomorrow take it down and replace it with the same work except All Rights Reserved. This is one of the reasons why I consider it unwise to pursue open access publishing without open access archiving. That is, if all of the articles published as open access are archived in repositories (preferably more than one), this is a much more sustainable open access scenario than open access publishing on its own. Because of the weakness of CC-BY, I do not recommend this license for journals or authors. If a few journals use this approach this is much less problematic than if it becomes a standard. For example, if all of the works in PubMedCentral were CC-BY, then a commercial company could copy the entire database in order to sell it (behind a paywall if they like, as CC-BY does not prohibit this) and then lobby the U.S. government to eliminate funding for the public version produced by the NIH. Currently, the fact that the NIH policy only covers public access (fair use), not CC-BY, means that there is no incentive for a company to do this. If in the future the works in PMC are covered by different licenses it will be more difficult to duplicate the whole than it would be if most or all of the works were CC-BY. If all of the articles in PMC are in different PMC international archives, then ongoing OA is more secure. Similarly, if all of the articles in PMC are also available through the author's institutional repositories, then even a commercial PMC takeover assuming all works are CC-BY could be countered effectively through this other source. In addition to the dangers of CC-BY as a default for open access, for many disciplines there are other reasons why CC-BY can be problematic. CC-BY is sometimes incompatible with research ethics. This is likely not a concern for mathematics, but will be a major concern in some areas of social sciences and humanities. For example, Sage publishes two journals in the areas of action research / participatory action research. In this type of research, the researcher acts as a facilitator and consultant; the actual research leadership as well as most of the content is provided by the participants. With this kind of research, it is not ethical for the researcher to give away rights to use the results for commercial purposes to any 3rd party with no requirement to seek permission. This is what CC-BY does. Those who advocate for CC-BY like to point to the positive potential for scholarship, but we need to keep in mind that CC-BY allows a commercial company to do things like take photos from scholarly articles and put them in image databases to sell for commercial purposes to whoever will pay the price. It is good to see that OASPA is now recognizing this issue by indicating that not all elements of a CC-BY article need be CC-BY (see the latest GOAL post by OASPA on this). Note that I am not convinced that it is ethical to give the results of this kind of research to a commercial company to sell for their own profit, regardless of the license used; this is contrary to the spirit of this whole
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
hi Marcin, On 2013-01-28, at 3:43 AM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote: Thanks, Heather, for this explanation. Yes, I agree that OA archiving shall be an important part of the system, no matter what specific OA license is being used, for the preservation of scholarship independently of the fate or misdoings of a given publisher. As to the dangers of commercial exploitation of CC-BY articles: can you point to a specific case of an article that was exploited in this way, causing harm to the authors? What I am pointing to is primarily a future potential danger to open access; the extent of the danger is proportionate to the use of the CC-BY license. That's one of the reasons why advocating for CC-BY as a default is problematic for open access. As an example of what might happen: BioMedCentral, the world's largest open access publisher, was sold to Springer a few years ago. Recently, we heard rumours that Springer is up for sale. This would be not too surprisinng - if Springer were sold, this would be the fourth time in less than a decade. Anyone who buys Springer (hence BMC) has no obligations at all to continue to provide the BMC articles on an open access basis. They can pursue whatever business model they please. The articles published in BMC will remain open access, however this is because of the work of PubMedCentral and institutional repositories, and BMC's good practices of actively cooperating with repositories. In other words, broad-based OA success using CC-BY, without careful planning including ensuring that works are deposited in repositories, could very easily revert to toll access in very little time. You're right that re-selling of CC-BY papers is legally possible, but it seems unlikely to me. Selling is not as easy as it sounds - in order to sell, there must be somebody who wants to buy. Why would anyone want to pay for a paper which is elsewhere available for free? If there is no reason to sell CC-BY papers, then why are people advocating for CC-BY? The point of advocating for CC-BY over CC-BY-NC is precisely to allow commercial use. Commercial use in the context of copyright (CC licenses are about copyright) means selling the works per se. If people wish to spur ideas in the commercial sector by making papers freely available, then any license will do as long as the works are free-to-read. Even articles with All Rights Reserved do not restrict ideas of the ideas included in the articles. Intellectual property in the area of ideas is covered by patent law, not copyright. If a CC-BY work is readily available and easy to find, you are right that there is likely not a huge market for this. My point is that publishers who use CC-BY have no obligation to provide free access or to continue to provide the work under the CC-BY license. One important point about CC-BY is that the license for a particular work cannot be revoked. This is correct. If I post a work on my website that is licensed CC-BY and you download it to your hard drive, I can never revoke the CC-BY license on that copy that is on your hard drive. However, I can remove the CC-BY licensed copy from my website, and either not make the work available at all (perhaps I abandoned my website), or replace the CC-BY copy with another one that is All Rights Reserved. In other words, if a work is licensed CC-BY and you have taken steps to ensure that you will have ongoing access under this license, such as making a copy, you have ongoing access and a license that cannot be revoked. However, if we are relying on the possibility that individuals might have downloaded a copy of a particular article to their hard drive, then someone who did not make such a copy basically has to guess somehow that someone, somewhere, has made a copy while the article was CC-BY licensed, then figure out who and make a request for a copy. This request could be denied, by the way. If I have the only copy of someone else's work available for sharing under the CC-BY license, I can give it away for free - or I can choose to sell it, under a more restricted license, if I want. CC-BY does grant commercial rights to any third party, after all; and the lack of restrictions inherent in CC-BY means that others can place more restrictions on the work downstream. If we don't want this to happen, we should use Sharealike (SA). best, Heather Morrison The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com Best, Marcin On 01/27/2013 12:18 AM, Heather Morrison wrote: hi Marcin, On 26-Jan-13, at 9:09 AM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote: Heather, I'm curious about your final note that CC-BY is not advisable for humanities. Why is it so? What's so different in HSS publications compared to, say, biology or mathematics where CC-BY is a gold standard? What other license is most recommended in humanities? Thanks. Thank you for raising the question, Marcin. I do not agree that
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
Anyone who buys Springer (hence BMC) has no obligations at all to continue to provide the BMC articles on an open access basis. In legal sense that's true, but in practice this is impossible, because Springer+BMC would totally destroy their credibility as an OA publisher which they've built over 10 years, and would lose immediately 90% of new submissions. I don't think they are a suicide - neither Springer nor any company who buys Springer for huge amount of money. And even if they are a suicide, no legal terms can stop any company from dying, so even if BMC had promised in the license agreement that their papers would always stay open (i.e., the copies on BMC website), there is always a risk that the publisher gets bankrupt, the website goes down and nobody can access the papers again. if not via PMC. So no changes in licensing terms could mitigate the risk of loosing access to once-accessible papers. But independent archives can indeed solve the problem. If there is no reason to sell CC-BY papers, then why are people advocating for CC-BY? The point of advocating for CC-BY over CC-BY-NC is precisely to allow commercial use. Commercial use is a broad and vague term. For example, displaying a paper on a website together with advertisements - is this commercial use or not? I think most people hope for add-on services to flourish on top of CC-BY literature, they rather don't expect the papers to be directly re-sold. Best regards Marcin On 01/28/2013 07:41 PM, Heather Morrison wrote: hi Marcin, On 2013-01-28, at 3:43 AM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote: Thanks, Heather, for this explanation. Yes, I agree that OA archiving shall be an important part of the system, no matter what specific OA license is being used, for the preservation of scholarship independently of the fate or misdoings of a given publisher. As to the dangers of commercial exploitation of CC-BY articles: can you point to a specific case of an article that was exploited in this way, causing harm to the authors? What I am pointing to is primarily a future potential danger to open access; the extent of the danger is proportionate to the use of the CC-BY license. That's one of the reasons why advocating for CC-BY as a default is problematic for open access. As an example of what might happen: BioMedCentral, the world's largest open access publisher, was sold to Springer a few years ago. Recently, we heard rumours that Springer is up for sale. This would be not too surprisinng - if Springer were sold, this would be the fourth time in less than a decade. Anyone who buys Springer (hence BMC) has no obligations at all to continue to provide the BMC articles on an open access basis. They can pursue whatever business model they please. The articles published in BMC will remain open access, however this is because of the work of PubMedCentral and institutional repositories, and BMC's good practices of actively cooperating with repositories. In other words, broad-based OA success using CC-BY, without careful planning including ensuring that works are deposited in repositories, could very easily revert to toll access in very little time. You're right that re-selling of CC-BY papers is legally possible, but it seems unlikely to me. Selling is not as easy as it sounds - in order to sell, there must be somebody who wants to buy. Why would anyone want to pay for a paper which is elsewhere available for free? If there is no reason to sell CC-BY papers, then why are people advocating for CC-BY? The point of advocating for CC-BY over CC-BY-NC is precisely to allow commercial use. Commercial use in the context of copyright (CC licenses are about copyright) means selling the works per se. If people wish to spur ideas in the commercial sector by making papers freely available, then any license will do as long as the works are free-to-read. Even articles with All Rights Reserved do not restrict ideas of the ideas included in the articles. Intellectual property in the area of ideas is covered by patent law, not copyright. If a CC-BY work is readily available and easy to find, you are right that there is likely not a huge market for this. My point is that publishers who use CC-BY have no obligation to provide free access or to continue to provide the work under the CC-BY license. One important point about CC-BY is that the license for a particular work cannot be revoked. This is correct. If I post a work on my website that is licensed CC-BY and you download it to your hard drive, I can never revoke the CC-BY license on that copy that is on your hard drive. However, I can remove the CC-BY licensed copy from my website, and either not make the work available at all (perhaps I abandoned my website), or replace the CC-BY copy with another one that is All Rights Reserved. In other words, if a work is licensed CC-BY and you have taken steps to ensure
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
On 2013-01-28, at 12:29 PM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote: Commercial use is a broad and vague term. For example, displaying a paper on a website together with advertisements - is this commercial use or not? I think most people hope for add-on services to flourish on top of CC-BY literature, they rather don't expect the papers to be directly re-sold. Question: are you saying that allowing any third party to make use of a scholar's work to advertise their own products and/or to sell their advertising services is one of the reasons people are advocating for CC-BY? If so, I would suggest that such a use is far more problematic than beneficial to scholarship, and I doubt very much that scholars who prefer to publish their work as open access are keen to permit such uses. Even if this were desirable, such a practice is also questionable with CC-BY, as this grants commercial rights but retains the author's moral rights. best, Heather Morrison ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
Before this goes too far, let's establish that commercial re-use is possible and is used. Scholars may not be averse to it. I have in mind monitoring organisations, which for a subscription, will survey the literature and provide subscribers with relevant data that they have culled. Think of newspaper cutting services and current awareness services which provide politicians and senior scholars with relevant data that they might have missed. Asking them to click on a download link is poor service, in this context. Another is Medifocus: attention to current info on your medical condition. Yes they don't yet seem to provide the full text, but they might. Moral rights are not affected, of course. None of these services pretends that it is their work. What they have done is to bring it to your attention to read. Then there is the second echelon of re-using parts of the publication, such as images, charts, tables, etc, and the whole field of data mining. If one puts together various studies can one come up with something bigger and new? For example a longitudinal study of tooth decay rates over centuries? Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison Sent: Tuesday, 29 January 2013 8:45 AM To: Marcin Wojnarski Cc: goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price? On 2013-01-28, at 12:29 PM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote: Commercial use is a broad and vague term. For example, displaying a paper on a website together with advertisements - is this commercial use or not? I think most people hope for add-on services to flourish on top of CC-BY literature, they rather don't expect the papers to be directly re-sold. Question: are you saying that allowing any third party to make use of a scholar's work to advertise their own products and/or to sell their advertising services is one of the reasons people are advocating for CC-BY? If so, I would suggest that such a use is far more problematic than beneficial to scholarship, and I doubt very much that scholars who prefer to publish their work as open access are keen to permit such uses. Even if this were desirable, such a practice is also questionable with CC-BY, as this grants commercial rights but retains the author's moral rights. best, Heather Morrison ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
Heather and I disagree profoundly on this. I have never met a scientist who has argued for CC-NC over CC-BY. There is a very strong case against CC-NC, with significant research into the issues (not just opinions) put by Hagedorn, Mietchen et al. http://www.pensoft.net/journals/zookeys/article/2189/creative-commons-licenses-and-the-non-commercial-condition-implications-for-the-re-use-of-biodiversity-information . -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
Arthur below gives this example of a commercial service scholars might not be averse to - Medifocus. As an example, I look at the Medifocus guidebook on peripheral neuropathy costs $32.95 for the print version or $24.95 for the electronic version. https://www.medifocus.com/ Comments: 1. Scholars giving away their works for free so that a company like Medifocus can sell in this manner is not much different from giving away works to commercial companies to profit from toll access. All of the arguments about public access to publicly funded works apply in this instance as well. Another way to express this: if it's okay for scholars to take the results of publicly funded research and give them away for companies to sell behind tolls for a profit, then what's wrong with toll access? 2.These prices might seem moderate in the developed world but for people in the developing world may be equal to month's wages. Why should scholars give away their works to be sold by profitable companies who have no obligation to make their value-added works available to the scholar or in the scholar's country? (This is one of the reasons I recommend Sharealike). 3. For a great list of free resources produced by not-for-profit entities, see Medline Plus, a consumer health resource clearinghouse produced by the National Institutes of Health: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ 4. Medifocus looks, at a quick glance, like a quality operation, and if Arthur is recommending it I'm happy to take his word for this. However, it's not hard to see pieces of scholarly works being incorporated into quack pseudo-science designed to sell the latest in snake oil. This would violate the author's moral rights no doubt, but then I'm not sure that it is wise to count on the ethics of snake oil purveyors. best, Heather Morrison On 28-Jan-13, at 8:06 PM, Arthur Sale wrote: Before this goes too far, let's establish that commercial re-use is possible and is used. Scholars may not be averse to it. I have in mind monitoring organisations, which for a subscription, will survey the literature and provide subscribers with relevant data that they have culled. Think of newspaper cutting services and current awareness services which provide politicians and senior scholars with relevant data that they might have missed. Asking them to click on a download link is poor service, in this context. Another is Medifocus: attention to current info on your medical condition. Yes they don't yet seem to provide the full text, but they might. Moral rights are not affected, of course. None of these services pretends that it is their work. What they have done is to bring it to your attention to read. Then there is the second echelon of re-using parts of the publication, such as images, charts, tables, etc, and the whole field of data mining. If one puts together various studies can one come up with something bigger and new? For example a longitudinal study of tooth decay rates over centuries? Arthur Sale -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison Sent: Tuesday, 29 January 2013 8:45 AM To: Marcin Wojnarski Cc: goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price? On 2013-01-28, at 12:29 PM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote: Commercial use is a broad and vague term. For example, displaying a paper on a website together with advertisements - is this commercial use or not? I think most people hope for add-on services to flourish on top of CC-BY literature, they rather don't expect the papers to be directly re- sold. Question: are you saying that allowing any third party to make use of a scholar's work to advertise their own products and/or to sell their advertising services is one of the reasons people are advocating for CC-BY? If so, I would suggest that such a use is far more problematic than beneficial to scholarship, and I doubt very much that scholars who prefer to publish their work as open access are keen to permit such uses. Even if this were desirable, such a practice is also questionable with CC-BY, as this grants commercial rights but retains the author's moral rights. best, Heather Morrison ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
On 28-Jan-13, at 8:24 PM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: Heather and I disagree profoundly on this. I have never met a scientist who has argued for CC-NC over CC-BY. There is a very strong case against CC-NC, with significant research into the issues (not just opinions) put by Hagedorn, Mietchen et al. http://www.pensoft.net/journals/zookeys/article/2189/creative-commons-licenses-and-the-non-commercial-condition-implications-for-the-re-use-of-biodiversity-information . Comment: I know how much you appreciate quantitative evidence, PMR, so here are some quick figures that suggest that scientists do very much want NC: Nature's Scientific Reports provides an interesting case study. This journal is similar to PLoS ONE - except that they give authors their choice of CC licenses. I just checked the 8 journals on the front page of scientific reports, and here are the CC license choices of the scientists themselves: CC-BY-NC-ND: 6/8 or 75% CC-BY: 1/8 or 12.5% CC-BY-SA: 1/8 or 12.5% A larger study would be useful - anyone interested? This is one of the advantages of the leaving the choice in the hands of the author. A quick glance at the DOAJ General Science list shows that about 20 of the 143 journals on this list use the NC element. This compares with about 19 journals on the same list using CC-BY. This means that scholars on editorial boards who are making decisions about gold open access publishing in the area of science are looking at the CC options and deciding that it makes sense to use noncommercial. Note that the majority in this sub-list still are not using CC licenses at all. To summarize: there is evidence that given a choice, scientists tend to prefer CC licenses including the noncommercial element. best, Heather Morrison, PhD The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
Heather, I'm curious about your final note that CC-BY is not advisable for humanities. Why is it so? What's so different in HSS publications compared to, say, biology or mathematics where CC-BY is a gold standard? What other license is most recommended in humanities? Thanks. Marcin On 01/25/2013 11:32 PM, Heather Morrison wrote: Some reflections on the Sage OPEN $99 per article news Sridar Gutam on the GOAL list has pointed out that even this APF, for a scholar from India, is far too high a price. Even in the West, I hear that there are rumblings on HSS listservs that scholars are up in arms about what looks like an attempt to shift the costs to them, personally. This could be a downside of a cost this low. Some reflections on whether for-profit at $99 is realistic - see Gary Daught's blog post for details on the numbers I'm referring to: https://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/article-processing-charges-reduced-to-99-on-sage-open-humanities-and-social-sciences-mega-journal/#comment-1872 Let’s think a little bit about the work involved and how this might relate to costs. 1,400 article submissions over the course of a year, assuming 200 business days per year, amounts to 7 article submissions per day. 160 published articles means .8 articles completed per day. How long would it take a managing editor to process 7 article submissions per day? Some would be immediately rejected as out of scope or so clearly of poor quality that they aren’t worth sending out for peer review. With an automated submissions process, there is some work involved up to the decision point, then often the rejection can be completed with an automated e-mail reply. Less than one published article per day, even with a high rejection rate, should not be a huge task for a PLoS ONE-like publish-if-it’s-good-research and DIY copyediting approach. At $395 / article = $64,000 / year, this should be a fair amount of money for staffing and overhead – it’s not even clear to me that this kind of volume would be a full-time position. If Sage OPEN were to increase its acceptance rate – perhaps by adding staff capable of dealing with a wider range of subjects, disciplines, languages – then it could benefit from cost efficiencies. If the acceptance rate were 1,000, at $99 / article, that’s just under $100,000 per year. Publishing 5 articles per day, when the publisher’s staff is not actually doing any of the editing, peer review, copyediting, etc., seems quite doable. Hire a Managing Editor with some academic background (perhaps a Master’s Degree?) at $50,000 per year, a junior assistant at $20,000 per year to deal with invoicing, factor in 25% overhead = total costs of $87,500, for a profit of $12,500 or an operating profit margin at 12.5%. Not bad - most of us wouldn't mind at all if our pension funds were paying out at 12.5% per year. I’m not saying this is what this costs, but it does look like the idea of attractive profits at $99 processing costs per article is something we should be having a close look at. As a final note – I find this interesting because of the PRICE. However, because Sage OPEN uses CC-BY which I consider to be frequently inadvisable in the social sciences and humanities due to concerns about research ethics, third party rights, and reasonable concerns about accuracy and author reputation when derivatives are allowed, I would NOT advise anyone to publish in Sage OPEN. If Sage opens their minds about licensing alternatives I’d be much more interested. best, Heather G. Morrison The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -- Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIT http://tunedit.org http://www.facebook.com/TunedIT http://twitter.com/TunedIT http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinwojnarski TunedIT - Online Laboratory for Intelligent Algorithms ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?
hi Marcin, On 26-Jan-13, at 9:09 AM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote: Heather, I'm curious about your final note that CC-BY is not advisable for humanities. Why is it so? What's so different in HSS publications compared to, say, biology or mathematics where CC-BY is a gold standard? What other license is most recommended in humanities? Thanks. Thank you for raising the question, Marcin. I do not agree that CC-BY is, or ought to be, a gold standard for publication in any discipline. While CC-BY superficially appears to be the embodiment of the BOAI definition of open access, a careful reading of the legal code (recommended, it's not that long) illustrates that they are not the same. For example, none of the CC licenses are specific to open access in the sense of free of charge. CC-BY is a weak and problematic license for open access. It is a means by which a licensor can waive certain rights under copyright which places no obligation at all on the licensor. I can post a CC-BY work today - behind a paywall, if I like - then tomorrow take it down and replace it with the same work except All Rights Reserved. This is one of the reasons why I consider it unwise to pursue open access publishing without open access archiving. That is, if all of the articles published as open access are archived in repositories (preferably more than one), this is a much more sustainable open access scenario than open access publishing on its own. Because of the weakness of CC-BY, I do not recommend this license for journals or authors. If a few journals use this approach this is much less problematic than if it becomes a standard. For example, if all of the works in PubMedCentral were CC-BY, then a commercial company could copy the entire database in order to sell it (behind a paywall if they like, as CC-BY does not prohibit this) and then lobby the U.S. government to eliminate funding for the public version produced by the NIH. Currently, the fact that the NIH policy only covers public access (fair use), not CC-BY, means that there is no incentive for a company to do this. If in the future the works in PMC are covered by different licenses it will be more difficult to duplicate the whole than it would be if most or all of the works were CC-BY. If all of the articles in PMC are in different PMC international archives, then ongoing OA is more secure. Similarly, if all of the articles in PMC are also available through the author's institutional repositories, then even a commercial PMC takeover assuming all works are CC-BY could be countered effectively through this other source. In addition to the dangers of CC-BY as a default for open access, for many disciplines there are other reasons why CC-BY can be problematic. CC-BY is sometimes incompatible with research ethics. This is likely not a concern for mathematics, but will be a major concern in some areas of social sciences and humanities. For example, Sage publishes two journals in the areas of action research / participatory action research. In this type of research, the researcher acts as a facilitator and consultant; the actual research leadership as well as most of the content is provided by the participants. With this kind of research, it is not ethical for the researcher to give away rights to use the results for commercial purposes to any 3rd party with no requirement to seek permission. This is what CC-BY does. Those who advocate for CC-BY like to point to the positive potential for scholarship, but we need to keep in mind that CC-BY allows a commercial company to do things like take photos from scholarly articles and put them in image databases to sell for commercial purposes to whoever will pay the price. It is good to see that OASPA is now recognizing this issue by indicating that not all elements of a CC-BY article need be CC-BY (see the latest GOAL post by OASPA on this). Note that I am not convinced that it is ethical to give the results of this kind of research to a commercial company to sell for their own profit, regardless of the license used; this is contrary to the spirit of this whole type of research. In many areas of the social sciences and humanities, precise expression is important to the author. This may be a very different situation from biology and mathematics. When words are changed in a derivative, this can impact both the meaning and the author's reputation if a derivative is cited. CC-BY allows for derivatives and requires attribution - which means that an author could be incorrectly cited for a derivative work. The possibility of inaccuracy in derivatives and subsequent citation of derivatives is an element that biologists and mathematicians might want to consider before adopting CC-BY as a standard. Finally, it is premature to say that CC-BY is considered a standard by any discipline. Most publishing in
