Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Developing-country perspectives on copyright and OA

Alan Story, Colin Darch, and Debora Halbert (eds.), The Copy/South Dossier, The Copy South Research Group, May 2006. (Thanks to Zapopan Martin Muela-Meza.) A large, 208-page report on the south or developing-country perspectives on a very wide range of copyright-related issues. Excerpt (from Section 5.11):
From the perspective of the South, OA journals that require Article Processing fees may defeat the purpose of the shift from the traditional journal. While the end user may have ‘free’ access to the materials, global South researchers may be unable to contribute to these journals because the processing fees could be too prohibitive....

There are two key and pressing issues for the South in self-archiving their works. One is content-oriented, the other infrastructure-oriented. The first (content-oriented) matter has to do with publisher agreements between authors and publishers. Many developing countries have small yet sustained scholarly publishing industries (existing outside of the large STM publishers arena), and the extent to which small publishers are negotiating copyright terms with developing country authors is unclear. There is much international pressure for multinational publishers to change their copyright agreements, and for them to support OA self-archiving. The results of the RoMEo study attest to this. It is unclear however how amenable small publishing establishments, especially in developing countries, are to OA self-archiving.

The second (infrastructure-oriented) issue centres on the required technical skills within a developing country to set up and maintain digital archives. These technical skills may be quite limited given that skilled technical staff migrate to other parts of the globe; prefer working outside of the higher education / research sector; or lack sufficient skills to create and maintain their own digital archives using established open source software. Another infrastructure-oriented issue frequently mentioned is the lack of affordable bandwidth capacity in developing countries.

It cannot simply be stated as yet which model(s) [OA journals or OA archives] is or are the best for those in the South, since both primary models have issues which need to be addressed. However, the concept of open access is a subtle form of resistance to copyright. The growing popularity of open access suggests that academics are beginning to understand that copyright can stand as a barrier to the diffusion of their academic work and it may be the case that an open access model will be a viable alternative.