Why the Time has Come for an Open Access Foundation - Technology Blog and Community from IT Experts - ComputerworldUK.com

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-03-18

Summary:

"A remarkable report has just been presented to the United Nations by the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Farida Shaheed. It's called 'Copyright policy and the right to science and culture' (.doc file). Here's its summary ... In the wake of those policies to require publicly-funded research to be freely available, the world of open access has been grappling with the issue of publishers ignoring the open access licence, and putting behind paywalls content that institutions had already paid to be free for all. That happened back in 2014, and seemed to have happened again this year, as the researcher Ross Mounce explains ... n the open-source world we call this dual licensing: it allows the companies that hold the copyright to distribute programs under a free software licence - typically the GNU GPL - which applies to all those who download it, but also to use a commercial, proprietary licence for a different version, usually marketed as some kind of "premium" product, which customers must pay for and cannot share ... This is yet another example of open access recapitulating the trajectory of open source - something I wrote about last year. The fact that it is cropping up in open access was entirely predictable. As Mounce says, Elsevier's action here in asking people to pay for open access papers may not be illegal, but it is not something that researchers will be happy about.  There are two ways to deal with this. Either individual researchers must start reading contracts in detail - not something many will undertake given their lack of time and limited legal knowledge. Or the open access community must create some kind of central body that can draw up model contracts and is prepared to enforce them - in the courts, if necessary. It could also play an important role in fighting the increasing danger of openwashing, which is cropping all around the world of openness. In the open source world, there are several of these that do important work here. As well as umbrella organisations like the Open Source Initiative and the Software Freedom Conservancy, there are also project-specific foundations such as the Linux Foundation and theApache Software Foundation.  Creating something similar for open access won't be easy - not least because funding is likely to be even harder - but the moment has now come for the open access community to take this crucial next step, just as the open source community did some years ago."

Link:

http://www.computerworlduk.com/blogs/open-enterprise/open-access-foundation-3601707/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.floss oa.copyright oa.licensing oa.policies oa.compliance oa.libre oa.openwashing

Date tagged:

03/18/2015, 12:12

Date published:

03/18/2015, 08:12