...(19) Should the scientific and research community enter into licensing schemes with publishers in order to increase access to works for teaching or research purposes? Are there examples of successful licensing schemes enabling online use of works for teaching or research purposes?
Education and research are excellent examples of areas in which the separation between copyright owners and content users is not clear. Teachers are historically also the producers of teaching material. Education therefore has a large interest in leeway offered to end users....Not only Wikipedia and Wiktionary are built upon free licenses, but also Wikibooks and Wikiversity which are specifically targeted towards educational goals. This approach also contributes to the empowerment and engagement of people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free content license, one of the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation. The advantage of free licenses is that they avoid the excessive bureaucracy arising from the demand of remunerations. Where these are used, it seems fair to tie them to a reasonable time frame, after which the work would become freely usable....
[TA publishers] have argued that an exclusivity or “embargo” period is needed in order to fund investments in quality control and to support publication costs. We believe that fee-for-access publishing models are not necessarily inconsistent with the broad goals of open access, as long as the embargo period(s), if any, are reasonable, and that subsequent to the embargo period, scholarly papers published in journals are deposited in an online repository and made available for download free of charge and free of technical or legal restrictions....
Furthermore, such works should be licensed to the public under terms that permit redistribution and appropriate reuse....Examples of licenses that support the ability to disseminate and to reuse works include the Creative Commons licenses....[S]uch open licenses need not be limited only to open access journals, but they can also be used a model for licensing works made available after any relevant embargo periods. Such licenses ensure that open access is not only available at a technical level through download (read-only access) but also at a legal level through appropriate licensing of copyright in order to permit the preparation of derivative works and other transformative uses (read-write access), which are central to scientific and cultural enterprises....
For almost two years, Science Commons has operated a portal and a tool called the “Scholars Copyright Addendum Engine,” which aggregates a wide variety of recognized “Author Addenda” by means of which scholars can enter into negotiations with publishers to retain rights of reuse for scholarly and teaching purposes....[But case-by-case negotiations will not bring about widespread transformation.] Therefore, we believe that effective policy intervention requires action at the funder or governmental level to set the appropriate standards, through mandates and incentives that ensure that fruits of research, and especially government-funded research, are disseminated as broadly as possible and with the fewest legal restrictions, consistent with sustainability and quality.
Science Commons also supports broad digital access to the scholarly and scientific corpus because we believe that many difficult and important scientific and social problems require that scientists and researchers be empowered to take advantage of software, Web tools, and other data management technologies to support advanced searching, querying, and information integration. However, in the present environment in which access to the corpus of scientific knowledge is restricted and fragmented into a variety of “wall gardens,” our ability to use that corpus and to apply modern computer technology to it is likewise fragmented and piecemeal. This has important implications for scientific productivity, impact of funding for research, knowledge dissemination and preservation, and the achievement of social and governmental goals.
Therefore, Science Commons encourages the Commission to consider strategies that incorporate the broad goals of open access, adoption of standardized licenses that facilitate appropriate reuse and exchange of knowledge and research products, and the enablement of digital information technology. We encourage the Commission to consider a variety of tools, including mandates, policies, and incentives to achieve this goal.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/25/2008 12:04:00 PM.
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.
