Open Access Isn't Just About Open Access | Electronic Frontier Foundation

"... We Need Copyright Laws That Support Open Access to Our Knowledge Commons ... Diego Gomez, a biodiversity researcher, could not access the biology papers he needed. Nor could his colleagues—fellow students and scientists in Colombia. Such articles are usually locked up behind expensive paywalls, with prices that add up even when doing a preliminary search. This cost is often mitigated by university subscriptions to journals but even the richest universities can't afford to pay for all the knowledge they need. So Diego and his colleagues formed an online reading group where they uploaded and shared the latest findings. In an open access world, not only would this be allowed, it would be typical. Unfortunately, Diego soon found himself at the other end of a criminal copyright lawsuit and facing up to eight years in prison. Paywalls tend to be the issue people point to most often when it comes to academic publishing, but those paywalls depend, in large part, on an elaborate system of copyright licensing. To state an obvious point that nonetheless seems to get lost: the legal key to publishers' ability to control access to knowledge is copyright. Researchers usually assign all their rights to the publisher, and the publisher is then free to parcel out the work as it sees fit. That's why open access—which means not only availability of scholarly works, but also the ability to share, reuse, remix, and build upon research—relies on flexible copyright policies and open licenses ..."