More Issues in Open Access(#OA) « martincoward.net

"There has been a recent flurry of activity around Open Access (OA) as Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) gear up to implement the recommendations of the Finch report. As readers of this blog know, I have been interested in the emergence of new forms of publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) for a while now, and since becoming an editor of Politics, my interest has sharpened. Those of you have read earlier blogs will know I am very much in favour of OA, but quite worried by the current proposals for so-called Gold OA (where open access is secured via the author or author’s institution paying an upfront Article Processing Charge or APC). I also perceive there to be a lack of detailed understanding of the whole infrastructure that lies submerged behind academic publishing: from peer review to the outreach activities of Learned Societies (disclaimer: I am trustee of the British International Studies Association) to mundane things like copy editing services. At the top of my list of worries is the restriction of opportunity that OA might entail...  There is another looming issue that has also vexed me – the mandating of a permissive Creative Commons License (CC-BY) for Gold OA journals. The Institute for Historical Research made an interesting foray into this area this week. I am a big fan of CC (indeed, this blog is under anAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license), but the CC-BY licence allows remixing in a way I am wary of. While it may be great for access to data it means that published work can be remixed for profit with only an attribution being required. This raises all kinds of questions.Copyright as it is currently signed over to publishers is restrictive and any easing would be greatly appreciated. But for HSS there seems to be an interesting problem brewing: given that the contribution made by HSS articles, is, in the main, interpretative there is significant value added by the author... in HSS providing access to publications is not really about providing access to underlying data – it is about providing access to what are considered compelling and creative interpretations of individual and social dynamics. There is a question as to whether ‘interpretation’ and ‘creation’ should be subject to more authorial control (note I am not advocating control by publishers) than CC-BY allows. Three examples ..."