The Open Access Schism: Recapitulating Open Source? - Open Enterprise

"As well as in free software itself, this column is interested in the ways that the ideas underlying open source are spreading far and wide. One of the earliest manifestations was in the field of academic publishing, where open access has been gaining ground steadily. It seems that the open access world has just entered the schism phase that mirrors the similar split between those espousing 'free software', and those who resolutely call it 'open source.' This most recent development is captured in yet another brilliant contribution from the unofficial chronicler of the open access world, Richard Poynder. His blog, called 'Open and Shut?', is simply the best resource there is to find out about open access, its issues and key individuals. You could spend many days reading through the resources there, and it would be time well spent. His latest post [.pdf] is nominally another interview, of which there are many on the site, this time with Paul Royster, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It's well worth reading, but here I'd like to concentrate on the 11-page introduction that Poynder provides. In it, he explores the key issues raised by Royster concerning that old favourite of open movements everywhere: licences, and which ones are 'best'. Here's the background ... But as Poynder points out, the trouble is that many of the open access repositories fail to comply with the BOAI definition: 'Since most papers deposited in repositories (or “open electronic archives”as BOAI described them) will have been published in traditional subscription journals we must assume that, even if the publisher has not insisted on the author signing over copyright in a paper, it is highly unlikely that that publisher will permit the work to be made available on a CC BY basis—unless it has been published by an OA publisher (which would really make it gold OA, not green). It is, therefore, hard to see how green OA can hope to conform to the BOAI definition of open access.'  That's a bit of a problem, since many of open access's biggest successes are of the Green kind (freely available from repositories of self-archived papers) rather than the Gold kind (freely available after formal publication of papers.) Worse, it is leading to a schism within the open access movement, between those who think CC-BY is indispensable for 'true' open access, and those who think Green open access, with other licences such as CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-ND, is good enough ... It's a crucially important debate for the open access world, just as the one around free software and open source was. Or, perhaps even more pertinently, the continuing discussions about which licence is 'better' - the GNU GPL, or the Apache licence ... There are (at least) two solutions to this problem. The first is to move not to CC-BY-SA, which would ensure that the licence was not changed by re-use, and thus that no re-enclosure could take place. That, of course, is similar to moving from Apache to the GNU GPL approach, which requires the same licence to be used.  Alternatively, the problems with Green OA could be addressed. The reason that many self-archived papers in repositories are not published under CC-BY is that the authors rather foolishly sign over their copyright to publishers, or agree to onerous conditions. This is really just a hangover from the past, when 'ordinary people' didn't really care about copyright, because it simply didn't matter. But in the digital world, it does, because copies are being made all the time, and so copyright kicks in automatically.  Giving up the copyright on your creation is just folly, and academics need to think about why it would be better to stop doing so. After all, publisher don't need copyright assigned to them - they just need a licence from the authors - but it's something they routinely demand because they know that doing so puts them in the driving seat.  Refusing to hand copyright over or to agree to other restrictive conditions would allow academics to retain full control over their work , and to place their papers in a Green OA repository under a CC-BY or CC-BY-SA licence if they wished. That, in turn, would make those depositions fully compatible with the standard definitions of open access ..."