Christopher N. Carlson, Open Access oder Fair Use? Ein Vergleich nach Kosten/Nutzen-Aspekten, in Maximilian Stempfhuber (ed.), Proceedings In die Zukunft publizieren. Herausforderungen an das Publizieren und die Informationsversorgung in den Wissenschaften, 2006, pp. 43-54. Self-archived May 23, 2006. In German but with this English-language abstract:
Following the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) of 2001, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access of 2003 gave the OA discussion a new impetus. The Declaration takes a very different approach from the Fair Use doctrine in the U.S., which is embodied in copyright law, whereas the Berlin Declaration postulates a voluntary system of Internet-based publication repositories together with incentives for depositors. Both approaches endeavour to make scholarly research and cultural heritage as broadly available as is possible, while freeing them of the status of trade-goods. This paper addresses the question of which of the two approaches is more promising in the long-term.
Comment. My German isn't strong enough to read the article with the care it deserves. But it looks like Carlson enumerates the strengths and weaknesses of OA and fair use, in full prose as well as a table, and then leaves the question for the reader to decide. If so, then something is amiss, since properly understood OA (at least where it exists) offers everything that fair use offers and more, including more permitted uses, more certainty about permission, and of course free online access to boot. Fair use does apply to more literature than OA, as Carlson points out, but that isn't a reason to "prefer" fair use in the sense that one stops working for OA.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
