Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, May 03, 2006

OA as an alternative to digital dystopia

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia? Forthcoming from Information Technology and Libraries, 25, no. 3 (2006). Excerpt (after summarizing a series of lock-down trends and the open access movement):
Given the uphill battle in the courts and legislatures, Creative Commons licenses (or similar licenses) and open access are particularly promising strategies to deal with copyright and DRM issues. Copyright laws do not need to change for these strategies to be effective....

It is not just a question of libraries helping to support open access by paying for institutional memberships to open access journals, building and maintaining institutional repositories, supporting open access mandates, encouraging faculty to edit and publish open access journals, educating faculty about copyright and open access issues, and encouraging them to utilize Creative Commons (or similar) licenses. To truly create change, libraries need to "walk the talk" and either let the public domain materials they digitize remain in the public domain or put them under Creative Commons (or similar licenses), and, when they create original digital content, put it under Creative Commons (or similar) licenses.

As the open access movement has shown, using Creative Commons licenses doesn't rule out revenue generation (if that is an appropriate goal), but it does require facilitating strategies, such as advertising and offering fee-based add-on products and services.

Update (October 4, 2006). The published edition is now online, though only accessible to subscribers.