Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Joint interview on OA

Cy Dillon, More Access, More Impact:  Updates on the Open Access Movement from Peter Suber and Jonathan Band, Virginia Libraries, April/May/June 2008.  

From my part of the interview:

...VL: From your point of view as a...writer and active scholar, how will OA improve scholarly communication?

PS: ...OA removes friction from the system of finding and retrieving relevant work. It overcomes the artificial barrier of institutional wealth, allowing scholars to publish for everyone in their field, and read work by everyone in their field, without regard to the budgets of their own libraries or the budgets of libraries elsewhere.

We're well into the era in which all serious research is mediated by sophisticated software. All digital literature, free or priced, is machine-readable and supports new and useful kinds of processing. But non-OA digital literature minimizes this opportunity by shrinking the set of inputs to this sophisticated software through access fees, password barriers, copyright restrictions, and software locks. By removing price and permission barriers, OA maximizes this opportunity and fosters an ecosystem of tools for searching, indexing, mining, summarizing, translating, querying, linking, recommending, alerting, and mashing-up....One important goal of the OA movement is to give these tools the widest possible scope of operation, and free up the universe of literature and data for all future forms of analysis....

VL: What serious threats do you see to the future of OA, and are you confident these can be overcome?

PS: ...[T]he largest barrier is still widespread ignorance and misunderstanding. Some of it is natural. In the big picture, OA is still fairly new, and the stakeholders who most need to know about it --researchers themselves-- are overworked, preoccupied, and temperamentally disinclined to act as a bloc. But some of it is the result of publisher lobbying campaigns to perpetuate certain myths about OA --for example, that it violates copyright or bypasses peer review. But good understanding of OA is spreading faster than the harmful myths, and every month influential institutions commit themselves to OA....

From Jonathan Band's part of the interview:

...VL: Suppose a writer wants the impact of open access, but also wants to retain rights such as the right to republish the material elsewhere. Is this possible under current copyright law?

JB: Yes --copyright law gives the author a great deal of control over the use of his work. Copyright lawyers refer to copyright as a bundle of rights, and an author can allocate the rights any way he chooses. So, he can license one publisher online distribution rights for free, while licensing hard copy publication rights to another publisher for a standard royalty. This assumes, of course, that the publishers agree to these terms. But it is important to remember that there are lots of publishers clamoring for good content, and authors often have the ability to secure the terms they need to accomplish their objectives.

VL: How might a journal like Virginia Libraries, a member of the Directory of Open Access Journals, assure that it takes no more rights from its contributors than absolutely necessary for OA publishing?

JB: Journals should take a hard look at what they really need to sustain their business models, and ask authors to license only those rights. Journals, like other entities, have a tendency to ask for more than they need because they want to keep their options open in an unpredictable future....

VL: Finally, please tell us a bit about why you are or are not optimistic about the future of open access publishing.

JB: I am very optimistic about the future of open access publishing. Universities around the world will follow the lead of the Harvard FAS. Likewise, governments and other granting agencies will adopt policies similar to the NIH public access policy. While publishers that add real value to authors will continue to flourish under the existing model, over time open access publishing will gain an increasingly large share of the scholarly communication market.