Older journal articles need to be open, too | SciELO in Perspective

Amyluv's bookmarks 2017-11-24

Summary:

"You may have seen it: “Publishers take ResearchGate to court, alleging massive copyright infringement”, as the recent headline in Science1proclaims. Similar headlines appeared in other journals and on many web sites as well. As ResearchGate is based in Germany, it is a rather easier legal target than Sci-Hub, which is operated by the Kazakhstani Alexandra Elbakyan. Both ResearchGate and Sci-Hub make it easy to obtain articles by sharing in a social network (ResearchGate) or simply by making direct downloads available of PDFs obtained via institutional proxies (Sci-Hub).

It is generally the case that subscriptions and licences are paid in advance, and that that sales of individual articles after the subscription period amount to minimal net revenues (if there are revenues at all, the fulfilment costs and maintenance of fulfilment systems must be deducted to arrive at net revenues). So my suggestion is that all paywalled journal articles should be given an open access licence – the full works, including re-usability – after a period of no more than 12 months of the date of publication. By the publishers, as in most cases they hold the copyright to those articles and only copyright holders can legally attach an open access licence such as a CC-BY licence to an article. The period of 12 months could gradually go down, too. This would open up millions of articles and yet have a minimal effect on the publishers’ finances. It would remove the unnecessary control legacy publishers have, as a result of having the copyrights, over the free dissemination of articles that have already secured their revenues for the publisher. Libraries, library consortia, and national or state agencies should make this a condition of any subscription or licence agreement, without which they won’t do business with the publisher in question. Combined with mandatory preprint posting, it could dramatically change access to, and usability of, the world’s scholarly output."

Link:

http://blog.scielo.org/en/2017/11/22/older-journal-articles-need-to-be-open-too/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » Amyluv's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.copyright oa.scholcomm oa.access oa.licensing oa.embargoes oa.sci-hub oa.publishers oa.researchgate oa.gold oa.green oa.bronze oa.trends oa.repositories oa.libre oa.journals oa.guerrilla

Date tagged:

11/24/2017, 16:52

Date published:

11/24/2017, 11:53