...Various ways of payment have been developed over the decades, or rather centuries, of science publishing, such as charges to authors (page charges), charges for advertisements, subsidies and grants, and, of course, combinations of the above, but the prevailing method is the subscription model, whereby the readers (vicariously, their institutional libraries) foot the bill. For subscriptions to work, the publisher needs to have some exclusivity to the content. This is where copyright comes in...
There is nothing intrinsically inappropriate in trading copyrights and using them as a means of exchange of value. But there are a few reasons why it may have become, in this day and age of the internet, sub-optimal and ineffective....For authors and their financial backers – be they funding agencies, universities or other research institutions; in short, the entire academic community – the opportunities of having universal accessibility of the research results that come out of the projects they have undertaken, are lost due to the intrinsic dissemination-limiting characteristics of exclusive economic rights if used in this way....The potential of brains to add significantly to humanity’s knowledge is not limited to those of researchers in the happy circumstance of having the means for unfettered access to these results....
But for publishers, too, the limits of a system of being paid by the transfer of copyrights are in sight. Due to the ease with which the actual content of what is published can be made available outside the formal publishing process, and the movement in the direction of making this availability compulsory as a condition of being funded, the value of the supposedly exclusive economic rights that are transferred with copyrights is eroding, because they are just no longer exclusive....
There is an irony in the fact that the purpose of copyright – a system of bestowing temporary exclusive economic rights, devised to promote the progress of science and useful arts – is, in an internet environment, likely to be better served by economic models that avoid exclusive economic use of copyright altogether. It may be time to replace the use of copyrights as a proxy for money when paying for the service of formal publication in peer-reviewed journals by the real thing: money. Doing so will obliterate the need to ‘transubstantiate’ copyright (and its inherent restrictiveness) into money, which is after all what selling subscriptions does. As a result, no longer depending on subscriptions for income, enables open access, immediate and at source, to flourish both for the benefit of science and society and as a business opportunity for publishers.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/14/2007 11:18:00 AM.
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.
