New mandates? No problem for The Rockefeller University Press

"The existing public access policy for our three journals—The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine, and The Journal of General Physiology—is fully compliant with new policies from the Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the Wellcome Trust. In addition to mandating public access, the new policies specify licensing terms for reuse of content by third parties, in particular for text and data mining. We question the need for these specific terms, and we have added a statement to our licensing policy stipulating that anyone, including commercial entities, is permitted to mine our published text and data.  On April 1 (no fooling), the RCUK, a federal funding system, and the Wellcome Trust, a private funder, will implement new public access policies. RCUK will require journals to release all articles reporting RCUK-funded research to the public within six months after publication. This unifies the policies of the seven research councils in the UK, which had varied considerably in their terms. If a journal offers immediate access for a fee, RCUK encourages authors to take advantage of this option. RCUK indicates that they will pay these fees through block grants to universities and other research institutions.  In the same manner, the Wellcome Trust continues their existing policy of paying immediate access fees on their authors’ behalf (if this option is available) or requiring journals to release articles reporting Wellcome-funded research to the public six months after publication. What is new about their policy is that, in exchange for paying the immediate access fees, they (and RCUK) now dictate the licensing terms for reuse of articles by third parties. These terms do not apply to articles released by the publisher after six months.  RUP is able to avoid this requirement by not offering an immediate access option. Indeed, we could not release all of our content under a license that permits unfettered commercial reuse of the work. This would allow commercial content aggregators to bundle and sell our content without any recompense to us, thus jeopardizing our subscription revenues. RUP has done the next best thing. Since May 2008, our content has been released to the public under a CC-BY-NC-SA license, which allows third party use of the content for noncommercial purposes but prevents its use for commercial gain without expressed permission (2).  Subscription-based publishers who do take immediate access fees from RCUK and the Wellcome Trust will, by necessity, have content under two different licenses—the one that applies to the bulk of their content and preserves their subscription revenues and the license that applies to immediate access articles funded by RCUK and the Wellcome Trust. This will add considerable confusion to the research community about what third parties can and cannot do with a particular journal’s content. There is an initiative by the National Information Standards Organization to tag individual articles with licensing information and to make that metadata accessible to the public (3), but those discussions are in their infancy, and implementation is probably several years away.  A final issue with the licensing provision is that it is not necessary to achieve one of the stated goals of the Wellcome Trust—to ensure 'that the content will be fully accessible by anyone' (including commercial entities) for text and data mining (4).  The existing publication policies of The Rockefeller University Press (RUP) are fully compliant with the new British policies. We release all of our content six months after publication, regardless of funding source. RUP articles are made freely available on our own website, and they are also posted in PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC. We do not offer an immediate access option because we do not believe in providing immediate access to just a subset of our articles.  RUP has long championed public access to research articles via a six-month embargo, and we thus support this aspect of the Wellcome Trust policy and the new RCUK policy. However, we question the value of a provision in their policies that specifies licensing terms for reuse of content by third parties. Both organizations now require that the articles for which they have paid an immediate access fee be made available under a Creative Commons attribution license (CC-BY) ..."