Open Access News

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Sunday, June 24, 2007

A publisher's take on copyright and OA

Kevin Taylor, Copyright and research: an academic publisher’s perspective, SCRIPT-ed, June 2007.  Taylor is the Intellectual Property Director at Cambridge University Press.  Excerpt:

...The range of submissions to The Gowers Review (December 2006)...demonstrated this diversity of attitudes towards rights, and the writer, in his day-to-day work regularly encounters the entire spectrum. This ranges from academics who unreservedly support Open Access models and would unhesitatingly make all of their written outputs freely available on the internet as soon as possible for others to re-use on the principle that maximising the most widespread accessibility should be any author’s priority; all the way to those who are highly concerned with protection and control to the point of scrutinising the small-print of every sales invoice and every end-user licence to be sure that their publisher is squeezing every last penny from their copyrights on their behalf.

A publisher has to mediate those attitudes and come up with models that satisfy to some degree, both ends of the spectrum....

An example of an attempt to create an acceptable author-publisher balance would be the rights which the authors of journal articles retain to deposit their work in institutional and subject repositories and to re-purpose their work in other publications of their own. Another example would be the willingness of many publishers to experiment with Open Access, author-pays or funding-agency-pays publishing models: CUP [Cambridge University Press] now operates that model for fifteen of its journals, with the Open Access content covered by the excellent Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence designed for such purposes....

A recent Position Paper on copyright from the Association of American Professional and Scholarly Publishers, published in May 2007, is tellingly sub-titled ‘An Appropriate Balance’: the writer believes that it is this ‘balance’, which we have to achieve and we are in practice achieving....

The Gowers Review takes a very balanced line on copyright, for good reasons. The copyright industries represent at least 7% of GDP in Britain....

A full-scale tilt into unrestricted Open Access would be too big a shift.  Someone has to pay, and it can be argued that the current mildly regulated framework which ‘publisher-controlled’ copyright represents does the job quite well: of keeping the economics in equilibrium....

Comments.

  • Taylor's chief conclusion about OA is unargued:  "A full-scale tilt into unrestricted Open Access would be too big a shift.  Someone has to pay...."  He doesn't discuss payment models for open access and, for journals, he doesn't connect copyright issues to payment issues.
  • Taylor focuses much more on books than on journals, while the OA movement focuses much more on journals than books.  He tells one anecdote, not excerpted above, about a CUP author who distributed his book freely online without CUP permission.  Taylor doesn't say that CUP lost money on the book and doesn't tell any (of the many) anecdotes about OA books that stimulated a net increase in sales.  He asserts without argument that the tension between author interests and publisher interests in his anecdote "is perhaps the same tension that we see in the debate around the Open Access movement in the Journals world" even though publishers (1) demand more rights from article authors than from book authors and (2) pay no royalties to article authors.
  • For my critique of the ALPSP position paper that Taylor supports, see Balancing author and publisher rights in the June 2007 issue of SOAN.