Science publishing: Open access must enable open use : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

"At the end of 2012, there is no longer a debate about whether the results of research should be freely accessible. All that remains is to work out when and how access will be enabled. Meanwhile, the political and economic question of 2012 has been: should governments invest to nurture economic recovery, or tighten their belts and risk further economic damage? Publicly funded research has often been at the heart of this debate as governments attempt to ensure that public investment is generating the greatest possible innovation, economic activity and societal gains. It is in this light that researchers should view the dramatic advance of open access in 2012. This shift, and the reason why governments and funders are increasingly adopting or examining open-access mandates, is about more than just the benefits of access. It is about the potential of open access to improve the efficiency of research itself, and to deliver a greater return on public investment. In this context, free access is not enough. To maximize the value of the public good and the return on investment, research outputs must be reusable. That does not just mean making data or papers available on the Internet, but ensuring that innovators can manipulate the material, including mining, translating or expressing it in imaginative ways or for new audiences. The most significant policy moves in open access in 2012 came from Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the Wellcome Trust, a major UK biomedical funder (see go.nature.com/qqqrsq and go.nature.com/u2oqym)... Making research outputs usable has many aspects. The technical side — standardizing the representations of data and knowledge in ways that make them easily transferable — remains challenging and needs further work. There are also legal challenges, but good tools exist that provide the rights to reuse research in any way that scientists can imagine: the Creative Commons licences. These easily and effectively define precise 'reuse rights'.  The Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence — a key component of the RCUK and Wellcome policies on open access — allows any kind of reuse, provided the copyright holder is properly attributed. PLOS, where I work as advocacy director, has always used the CC BY licence, like other major open-access publishers, and this licence is emerging as a standard for open-access publications. The RCUK and Wellcome policies explicitly encourage researchers to submit their papers to journals that will publish the work under a CC BY licence — making these the first funders to take such a step. The target is to create a critical mass of freely accessible and freely reusable literature. The RCUK and Wellcome have taken the lead, now others must follow if everyone is to reap the full benefits of effective research communication.  There are two established mechanisms for making research articles accessible. One is for the publisher to make the version of record freely available online. The second is for a version to be made available in an institutional, disciplinary or funder repository. These two routes are often referred to as 'gold' and 'green' ..."