Open Access News

The ALPSP, AAP/PSP, and STM have issued a joint white paper, Author and Publisher Rights For Academic Use: An Appropriate Balance, May 2007.  From the announcement:

In particular, the White Paper notes that:

Academic research authors and their institutions should be able to use and post the content that such authors and institutions themselves provide for internal institutional, non-commercial research and education purposes; 

Publishers should be able to determine when and how the official publication record occurs, and to derive the revenue benefit from the publication and open posting of the official record (the final published article), and its further distribution and access in recognition of the value of the services they provide.  

From the full text:

Copyright transfers or exclusive licenses, even with the rights reserved by authors for academic uses as noted above, provide the legal basis for subscription and licensing activities, whether in the print or the digital environment and whether for journals or individual articles. Transfers or exclusive licenses ensure that publishers have the right to deal with uses beyond the ‘first publication right’, to facilitate electronic delivery and investments in such systems, and to manage permissions and similar rights management systems. Exclusive rights also provide a legal basis for publishers to administer copyright and permissions matters for authors and enforce copyright claims with respect to plagiarism and related ethical issues....

Exclusive rights are critical to administering the scientific record and ensuring viable business models for journals....

Recently, a number of funding agencies, public and private, have asserted a right to control the distribution of articles that result from funded research programs. Publishers generally recognize the importance of research funding, and the public interest involved, but are concerned about the potential to waste monies with unnecessary duplicate systems, confuse the scientific record, and undermine journal revenue, given the large volume of funding for scientific and medical research. Many publishers also question whether the goals of these agencies could be better met through alternative means (posting of abstracts or pre-prints, links to publishers’ own web sites, the actual creation of more consumer-oriented content). Publishers are gravely concerned that on one hand their investments in and contributions to the editing and peer-review systems are dismissed as trivial, while on the other hand these agencies insist that nothing will help to meet the agencies’ goals other than open public access to the articles that benefit the most from publishers’ contributions.

Most publishers in the scholarly community recognize, as noted above, that most academic or scholarly uses by authors of their own papers are appropriate and unlikely to harm business models. Typically publisher policies and publishing agreements note the retention or granting of permission for extensive use of author’s papers within the author’s institution, notably for teaching purposes, and posting of some version of the paper for institutional repositories and author personal pages....

Our view is that the appropriate balancing of rights for academic journal publishing should be on these general terms:

• Academic research authors and their institutions should be able to use and post the content that such authors and institutions themselves provide (as noted above, most publishers already provide for this) for internal institutional noncommercial research and education purposes; and
• Publishers should be able to determine when and how the official publication record occurs, and to derive the revenue benefit from the publication and open posting of the official record (the final published article), and its further distribution and access in recognition of the value of the services they provide.

An important implication of the above view is that funding agencies, search engines, and other third parties who wish to use or distribute the publisher versions of journal articles should only do so upon consultation and under an agreement with the publisher.

Comments.

1. Academic research authors and their institutions should be able to use and post the content that such authors and institutions themselves provide for internal institutional, non-commercial research and education purposes....  This key sentence is unfortunately ambiguous.  Does the adjective "internal" apply only the word immediately following it in the sentence or to all the words following it?  If the former, then the document would allow OA postprints to be used for non-commercial research whether or not it was internal to the author's institution.  If the latter, then it would restrict the use of OA postprints so much that they'd have to be removed from OA repositories, which deliberately make their contents accessible to all users everywhere.  In that case, the document's position is one-sided, insufficient, and a retreat from the permissions most publishers already give to post to an institutional repository.  (BTW, the sentence in the announcement slightly supports the first reading by inserting a comma after "institutional", while the sentence in the body of the text slightly supports the second reading by omitting the comma.)
2. Copyright transfers or exclusive licenses...provide the legal basis for subscription and licensing activities.... This is generally true.  But it's not a justification for those who think that "publication and licensing activities" are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
3. The argument that publishers need exclusive rights to prosecute plagiarists is baloney.  First, the rights are rarely used this way.  Plagiarism is typically punished by the plagiarist's institution, not by courts --i.e. by social norms, not by law.  Second, if it's ever desirable to pursue a plagiarist in court and authors don't give publishers the right to do so on their own, then authors retain that right to use as they see fit.  Third, many authors would rather have a larger audience and impact than give their publisher the seldom-used legal tools to prosecute plagiarists.  Authors should make this decision, not publishers.  Finally, if an author discovers a plagiarist and the publisher really wants to get involved, the author can always delegate the publisher to act as his/her agent.  For this purpose, publishers do not need rights from the time of publication, nor do they need exclusive rights, let alone a policy to limit access to the author's work.
4. The argument that OA policies at public funding agencies will lead to wasteful duplication is also baloney.  Some publishers are providing OA to some content when it's sufficiently old. But this is a far cry from providing OA to virtually all publicly-funded research within six months of publication. If ALPSP, AAP/PSP, and STM are saying that the voluntary efforts of their members will approach what FRPAA (for example) would mandate, then the duplication argument starts to make sense.  But in that case they have to stop arguing that OA to publicly-funded research would kill their revenues, kill their journals, and kill peer review.  They can't have it both ways.
5. [F]unding agencies, search engines, and other third parties who wish to use or distribute the publisher versions of journal articles should only do so upon consultation and under an agreement with the publisher.... Fair enough but not really responsive.  The funder policies and proposals that these publishers oppose do not apply to the published version of an article.  They apply only to the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript.