Copyright and Open Access 2014 | Open Knowledge Foundation Blog

This week has been proclaimed Copyright week by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and today, Wednesday Jan 15, is Open Access Day 2014. It is almost exactly 1 year ago that Aaron Swartz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz) died in the middle of his struggle for open knowledge and it would be a good thing to make this week and in particular Open Access Day, a recurring event in his honor. The open access movement has gained momentum in the past year and too much has happened to list every thing. Instead lets focus on a few key events and developments. In 2013 the White House has issued a directive stating that all publicly funded research should be made publicly available in repositories. The reaction of the scientific publishers has been to allow this, but under the condition that there is an embargo time of 6 months or 1 year. Many have thought that this would be a necessary transition measure, but recently they have been proven very wrong in this assumption because a powerful lobby of publishers is now even demanding for embargo times of up to 3 years! In our opinion any embargo time for making publications open access is the wrong thing to do: it is not in the interest of science, not in the interest of society, it seems designed only to protect the rights of the publishers in order to maintain their profits. Any paper, especially in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths disciplines, refers to work done at least 1-2 years previously. Combined with the inherent fast pace of science, any embargo period – especially prolonged embargo periods – will make sharing of the information less useful and less efficient by prolonging this time span further. Instead we should strive for Zero-embargo publication and push for SHORTER review and handling times, which can sometimes be as long as 6 months! We should remember Open Access is not only about having information freely available to view. People should also be able to reuse the information freely with no restrictions other than the requirement to attribute. Instead of traditional copyright rules and property rights open access publishers increasingly use a set of licenses developed by Creative Commons. These licenses provide a basic choice of rules for the usage of the work, in combination with the stringent demand for attribution of the work to the original author(s). In this way copyright remains (forever) with the author while allowing for unrestricted (or in other cases somewhat restricted) use of the information ... However not only political and scientific support is important. We want to have citizens, students, entrepreneurs, and everyone else who needs (specific) information to push for global open access to all academic literature. And we need your help to do this. [1] You can contact the Open Knowledge Foundation by registering on the website [2] You can subscribe to any of the mailing lists of the OKF for instance the open access list and take part in discussions [3] You can share your stories on difficulties or success with accessing information on the website WhoNeedsAccess [4] You can download the OpenAccessButton and start registering where you hit paywalls when trying to access information"