Research: Put it up right or get taken down - Open Access

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-12-13

Summary:

"Scholarly publishing giants like Elsevier own much of the knowledge that academics produce, in the form of the copyright to our articles. In the last few weeks, they’ve stepped up enforcement of their property rights, issuing "take-down notices" to Academia.edu, where some authors have posted PDFs of their articles. These articles were published in Elsevier-owned journals and are legally available only by subscription, often at exorbitant prices. After journal staff sent the submitted manuscripts to academics to review and created PDFs in the style of the journals, the authors signed away their copyright to Elsevier. So Elsevier is certainly within their legal rights to not allow posting of the final article PDF to third-party sites, whether Academia.edu or an author’s personal webpage. Some have suggested that we scholars should be actively rebelling against this situation by illegally posting the final article PDF to our websites. I don’t think encouraging this is a good idea. I say that in spite of my disgust with the current system of signing away our rights to publishers, which I believe stifles scholarship and hinders innovation. I have a partial boycott policy with regards to Elsevier and am exercised enough to contribute to several open access related initiatives, as well as lectures, blog posts, and a sarcastic video . But I don't think we should be encouraging this illegal practice of posting final PDFs. Even from a purely pragmatic perspective, it is a piecemeal action that distracts people from comprehensive solutions. It increases the availability only of the specific articles that are posted. We will not see university administrators and grant funders encouraging people to do something illegal, and as long as the administrators and funders do not encourage something, many academics will not do it, so it is not a large-scale solution. We have to look for solutions that official policymakers can get behind. Illegal action can be useful in another way: attracting attention and exposing injustice, but in this domain we may be past that stage. Over the last five years, the open access movement has been highly effective in increasing awareness of the unnecessary restrictions on dissemination of scholarly knowledge. An initiative that all levels of the research sector can support is the posting of preprints to websites such as institutional digital repositories. A preprint is the author-formatted manuscript that a publishers normally cannot claim copyright of, before it is turned into the PDF that appears in the journal. If posting preprints is linked by universities and funders to their promotions and research evaluation processes, the majority of researchers will begin posting their preprints rather quickly! This has already happened in Belgium at the University of Liege, and in Australia at the Queensland University of Technology. Wherever such a policy spreads, it brings increased citations for researchers, because preprint repositories are fully indexed by sites such as Google Scholar. It also moves scholarship towards a preprint-sharing culture, accelerating progress (because we don't have to wait for the publishers for research to become available), facilitating innovation (such as open peer review, since many manuscripts will already be available openly on websites), and leading to library savings (through cancellation of journal subscriptions) ..."

Link:

http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/openaccess/2013/12/research_put_it_up_right_or_ge.html

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.licensing oa.comment oa.mandates oa.green oa.universities oa.advocacy oa.copyright oa.prestige oa.recommendations oa.preprints oa.colleges oa.qut oa.u.liege oa.takedowns oa.repositories oa.hei oa.libre oa.policies oa.versions

Date tagged:

12/13/2013, 17:28

Date published:

12/13/2013, 12:28