DU EFF suit - critical information for Mods and DUers for going forward.

[kristopher]

This is a question for discussion - how do we at DU label copyrighted material that is intended by the copyright owner to be distributed as widely as possible? The article below on "Open Access" is an example of just such material.

There are two areas of work protected by copyrights, and they are distinctly different. The owners of for profit writings don't want you to share their copyrighted material, but the owners of advocacy and academic copyrights usually WANT you to share and use their material to promote public discussion.

In the past the costs of publishing were a limiting factor, and access was limited to cover those costs. The compromise has been to provide full access and distribution to executive summaries and abstracts. Those are portions of copyrighted material that is DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY FOR PUBLIC DISTRIBUTION.

But with modern technology, the cover-the-cost factor for academic and public policy research is rapidly disappearing and it is more and more common for content owners to simply put it all out there for anyone that wants it.

Unfortunately the fact that is that owners of for-profit writings are enforcing their rights, often capriciously as we see on today's front page. The EFF presser notes, as a problem associated with the Righthaven lawsuit, the chilling of free and open speech on internet. Well they've succeeded. I just had 2 threads locked for infringing copyrights of material that is INTENDED for free distribution over the internet. I don't blame the mods, but it is something the DU community could benefit from discussing.

One case was an "executive summary" of a free to download report by a public advocacy organization.
The second case is another copyrighted summary of a paper by a different public advocacy organization. That organization usually charges for the full paper, but they encourage the use of the summary to let people know the article exists. It is a sales tool. In this case, however, there was an explicit statement waiving the price and offering the paper for free because the URGENCY of the topic prompts them to seek the widest dissemination possible.

From the point of view of public advocacy groups, is usually permissible to reproduce their material without prior consent. I can understand DU's position and the problem that exists in determining whether material is Open Access or precisely what Fair Use covers in any given situation. There are specific ways the content providers can identify their work as open access (see article below), but they seldom are aware of the need for action on their part.

If we apply the the for-profit guidelines blindly to any copyright content without considering the purpose for which the material was created (for-profit or public improvement) then those hoping to obscure the truth are the winners.

My suggestions are that known open access be identified as such with a set label and treated with due regard by mods, and executive summaries and abstracts from public advocacy and academic papers be recognized as generically open access.

And finally, those of us who are involved in public advocacy should ensure that users of our web content be able to readily identify the way we want our materials to be used. As you can see below, it doesn't have to be complicated.



Open Access Applies

Open Access Overview

Focusing on open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints

This is an introduction to open access (OA) for those who are new to the concept. I hope it's short enough to read, long enough to be useful, and organized to let you skip around and dive into detail only where you want detail. It doesn't cover every nuance or answer every objection. But for those who read it, it should cover enough territory to prevent the misunderstandings that delayed progress in our early days.

If this overview is still too long, then see my very brief introduction to OA. It's available in a dozen languages and should print out on just one page, depending on your font size. If these pieces are too short, see my other writings on OA.

Once you're acquainted with the general idea of OA, follow new developments through the OA Tracking Project and the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. (My blog, Open Access News, reported new developments in detail starting in May 2002; I laid it down in April 2010, but the archive remains online.)

I welcome your comments and suggestions.

Peter Suber


* Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
o OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions). The PLoS shorthand definition —"free availability and unrestricted use"— succinctly captures both elements.
o There is some flexibility about which permission barriers to remove. For example, some OA providers permit commercial re-use and some do not. Some permit derivative works and some do not. But all of the major public definitions of OA agree that merely removing price barriers, or limiting permissible uses to "fair use" ("fair dealing" in the UK), is not enough.
o Here's how the Budapest Open Access Initiative put it: "There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."
o Here's how the Bethesda and Berlin statements put it: For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship...."
o The Budapest (February 2002), Bethesda (June 2003), and Berlin (October 2003) definitions of "open access" are the most central and influential for the OA movement. Sometimes I refer to them collectively, or to their common ground, as the BBB definition.
o When we need to refer unambiguously to sub-species of OA, we can borrow terminology from the kindred movement for free and open-source software. Gratis OA removes price barriers alone, and libre OA removes price barriers and at least some permssion barriers as well. Gratis OA is free of charge, but not free of copyright of licensing restrictions. Users must either limit themselves to fair use or seek permission to exceed it. Libre OA is free of charge and expressly permits uses beyond fair use. Gratis OA is free as in beer. Libre OA is free as in beer and free as in speech.
o In addition to removing access barriers, OA should be immediate, rather than delayed, and should apply to full texts, not just abstracts or summaries.

* OA is compatible with copyright, peer review, revenue (even profit), print, preservation, prestige, quality, career-advancement, indexing, and other features and supportive services associated with conventional scholarly literature.
o The primary difference is that the bills are not paid by readers and hence do not function as access barriers.

* The legal basis of OA is the consent of the copyright holder (for newer literature) or the expiration of copyright (for older literature).
o Because OA uses copyright-holder consent or the expiration of copyright, it does not require the reform, abolition, or infringement of copyright law.
o One easy, effective, and increasingly common way for copyright holders to manifest their consent to OA is to use one of the Creative Commons licenses. Many other open-content licenses will also work. Copyright holders could also compose their own licenses or permission statements and attach them to their works (though there are good reasons not to do so without legal advice).
o When copyright holders consent to OA, what are they consenting to? Usually they consent in advance to the unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking, and crawling of the full-text of the work. Most authors choose to retain the right to block the distribution of mangled or misattributed copies. Some choose to block commercial re-use of the work. Essentially, these conditions block plagiarism, misrepresentation, and sometimes commercial re-use, and authorize all the uses required by legitimate scholarship, including those required by the technologies that facilitate online scholarly research.
o For works not in the public domain, OA depends on copyright-holder consent. Two related conclusions follow: (1) OA is not Napster for science. It's about lawful sharing, not sharing in disregard of law. (2) OA to copyrighted works is voluntary, even if it is sometimes a condition of a voluntary contract, such as an employment or funding contract. There is no vigilante OA, no infringing, expropriating, or piratical OA.
o Of course OA can be implemented badly so that it infringes copyright. But so can ordinary publishing. With a little care it can be implemented well so that doesn't infringe copyright. Just like ordinary publishing.

* The campaign for OA focuses on literature that authors give to the world without expectation of payment.
o Let me call this royalty-free literature. (It's interesting that there isn't already a standard term for this.)
o There are two reasons to focus on royalty-free literature. First, it reduces costs for the provider or publisher. Second, it enables the author to consent to OA without losing revenue.
o The most important royalty-free literature for our purposes is the body of peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly research articles and their preprints. (Non-academics are often surprised to learn that scholarly journals generally do not pay authors for their articles.)
o Obviously no one writes royalty-free literature for money. Scholars write journal articles because advancing knowledge in their fields advances their careers. They write for impact, not for money. It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to note that it is accompanied by a strong self-interest in career-building. OA does not depend on altruistic volunteerism.
o Because scholars do not earn money from their journal articles, they are very differently situated from most musicians and movie-makers. Controversies about OA to music, movies, and other royalty-producing content, therefore, do not carry over to research articles.
o Royalty-free literature is the low-hanging fruit of OA, but OA needn't be limited to royalty-free literature. OA to royalty-producing literature, like monographs, textbooks, and novels, is possible as soon as the authors consent. But because these authors often fear the loss of revenue, their consent is more difficult to obtain. They have to be persuaded either (1) that the benefits of OA exceed the value of their royalties, or (2) that OA will trigger a net increase in sales. However, there is growing evidence that both conditions are met for most research monographs.
o Nor need OA even be limited to literature. It can apply to any digital content, from raw and semi-raw data to images, audio, video, multi-media, and software. It can apply to works that are born digital or to older works, like public-domain literature and cultural-heritage objects, digitized later in life.
o I refer to "peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints" in my subtitle because it's the focus of most OA activity and the focus of this overview, not because it sets the boundaries of OA.

* Many OA initiatives focus on publicly-funded research.
o The argument for public access to publicly funded research is strong, and a growing number of countries require OA to publicly-funded research.
o The campaign for OA to publicly-funded research usually recognizes exceptions for (1) classified, military research, (2) research resulting in patentable discoveries, and (3) research that authors publish in some royalty-producing form, such as books. Recognizing these exceptions is at least pragmatic, and helps avoid needless battles while working for OA to the largest, easiest subset of publicly-funded research.
o The lowest of the low-hanging fruit is research that is both royalty-free and publicly-funded. The policy of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a good example.
o But the OA movement is not limited to publicly-funded research, and seeks OA to research that is unfunded or funded by private foundations (like the Wellcome Trust or Howard Hughes Medical Institute).

* OA literature is not free to produce or publish.
o No serious OA advocate has ever said that OA literature is costless to produce, although many argue that it is much less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature, even less expensive than priced online-only literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers.
o As the BOAI FAQ put it: "Free is ambiguous. We mean free for readers, not free for producers. We know that open-access literature is not free (without cost) to produce. But that does not foreclose the possibility of making it free of charge (without price) for readers and users."
o The costs of producing OA literature, the savings over conventionally published literature, and the business models for recovering the costs, depend on whether the literature is delivered through OA journals or OA repositories. (Details below.)
o For those who do argue that OA literature costs less to produce than non-OA literature of comparable quality, how does the argument run? In short: OA dispenses with print (but so do many non-OA journals nowadays). OA eliminates subscription management (soliciting, tracking, renewing subscribers, negotiating prices and site licenses, collecting fees). OA eliminates DRM (authenticating users, distinguishing authorized from unauthorized users, blocking access to the unauthorized). OA reduces or eliminates legal expenses (drafting and enforcing restrictive licenses). Many OA journals eliminate marketing and rely solely on spontaneous aid from other players, such as search engines, bloggers, discussion forums, social tagging, and social networking. While reducing these expenses, OA adds back little more than the cost of collecting author-side fees or institutional subsidies.
o As long as the full-text is OA, priced add-ons or enhancements are compatible with OA. If the enhancements are expensive to provide, then providers may have to charge for them. If they are valuable, then providers may find people willing to pay for them. At some OA journals, priced add-ons provide part of the revenue needed to pay for OA.

* OA is compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance.
o Peer review does not depend on the price or medium of a journal. Nor does the value, rigor, or integrity of peer review.
o One reason we know that peer review at OA journals can be as rigorous and honest as peer review in conventional journals is that it can use the same procedures, the same standards, and even the same people (editors and referees) as conventional journals.
o Conventional publishers sometimes object that one common funding model for OA journals (charging fees to authors of accepted articles or their sponsors) compromises peer review. I've answered this objection at length elsewhere (1, 2).
o OA journals can use traditional forms of peer review or they can use innovative new forms that take advantage of the new medium and the interactive network joining scholars to one another. However, removing access barriers and reforming peer review are independent projects. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review and doesn't presuppose any particular model.
o The reverse is not true, however. Some emerging models of peer review presuppose OA, for example models of "open review" in which submitted manuscripts are made OA (before or after some in-house review) and then reviewed by the research community. Open review requires OA but OA does not require open review.
o In most disciplines and most fields the editors and referees who perform peer review donate their labor, just like the authors. Where they are paid, OA to the resulting articles is still possible; it merely requires a larger subsidy than otherwise.
o Despite the fact that those exercising editorial judgment usually donate their labor, performing peer review still has costs --distributing files to referees, monitoring who has what, tracking progress, nagging dawdlers, collecting comments and sharing them with the right people, facilitating communication, distinguishing versions, collecting data, and so on. Increasingly these non-editorial tasks are being automated by software, including free and open-source software.

* There are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles, OA journals ("gold OA") and OA repositories ("green OA").
o The chief difference between them is that OA journals conduct peer review and OA repositories do not. This difference explains many of the other differences between them, especially the costs of launching and operating them.
o There are other OA vehicles on which I won't focus here, such as personal web sites, ebooks, discussion forums, email lists, blogs, wikis, videos, audio files, RSS feeds, and P2P file-sharing networks. There will undoubtedly be many more in the future.
o Most activists refer to OA delivered by journals as gold OA (regardless of the journal's business model), and to OA delivered by repositories as green OA.
o The green/gold distinction is about venues or delivery vehicles, not user rights or degrees of openness. It is not equivalent to the gratis/libre distinction.

* OA journals ("gold OA"):
o OA journals conduct peer review.
o OA journals find it easier than non-OA journals to let authors retain copyright.
o OA journals find it easier than OA repositories to provide libre OA. OA repositories cannot usually generate permission for libre OA on their own. But OA journals can.
o Some OA journal publishers non-profit (e.g. Public Library of Science or PLoS) and some are for-profit (e.g. BioMed Central or BMC).
o OA journals pay their bills very much the way broadcast television and radio stations do: those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Sometimes this means that journals have a subsidy from a university or professional society. Sometimes it means that journals charge a publication fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author's sponsor (employer, funding agency). OA journals that charge publication fees usually waive them in cases of economic hardship. OA journals with institutional subsidies tend to charge no publcation fees. OA journals can get by on lower subsidies or fees if they have income from other publications, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts. Some OA publishers (such as BMC and PLoS) waive the fee for all researchers affiliated with institutions that have purchased an annual membership.
o A common misunderstanding is that all OA journals use an "author pays" business model. There are two mistakes here. The first is to assume that there is only one business model for OA journals, when there are many. The second is to assume that charging an upfront fee is an "author pays" model. In fact, most OA journals (70%) charge no author-side fees at all. Moreover, most conventional or non-OA journals (75%) do charge author-side fees. When OA journals do charge fees, the fees are often paid by author-sponsors (employers or funders) or waived, not paid by authors out of pocket.
o A growing number of universities maintain funds to pay publication fees on behalf of faculty who choose to publish in fee-based OA journals.
o Some OA proponents use a color code to classify journals: gold (provides OA to its peer-reviewed research articles, without delay), green (permits authors to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in OA repositories), pale green (permits, i.e. doesn't oppose, preprint archiving by authors), gray (none of the above).
o For details on the business side of OA journals, see the OAD list of Guides for OA journal publishers.
o We can be confident that OA journals are economically sustainable because the true costs of peer review, manuscript preparation, and OA dissemination are considerably lower than the prices we currently pay for subscription-based journals. There's more than enough money already committed to the journal-support system. Moreover, as OA spreads, libraries will realize large savings from the conversion, cancellation, or demise of non-OA journals.
o For a list of OA journals in all fields and languages, see the Directory of Open Access Journals.
o For news about OA journals, follow the oa.journals and oa.gold tags at the OA Tracking Project.

* OA repositories ("green OA"):
o OA repositories can be organized by discipline (e.g. arXiv for physics) or institution (e.g. DASH for Harvard). When universities host OA repositories, they usually take steps to ensure long-term preservation in addition to OA.
o OA repositories do not perform peer review themselves. However, they generally host articles peer-reviewed elsewhere.
o OA repositories can contain preprints, postprints, or both.
+ A preprint is any version prior to peer review and publication, usually the version submitted to a journal.
+ A postprint is any version approved by peer review. Sometimes it's important to distinguish two kinds of postprint: (a) those that have been peer-reviewed but not copy-edited and (b) those that have been both peer-reviewed and copy-edited. Some journals give authors permission to deposit the first kind of postprint but the not the second kind in an OA repository.
o OA repositories can include preprints and postprints of journal articles, theses and dissertations, course materials, departmental databases, data files, audio and video files, institutional records, or digitized special collections from the library. Estimates of the costs of running a repository depend critically on how many different functions they take on. If the average cost of an institutional repository is now high, it's because the average institutional repository now does much more than merely provide OA to deposited articles.
o OA repositories provide OA by default to all their contents. Most now also allow "dark deposits" which can be made OA at any later date. This is useful in working with publishers who permit green OA only after an embargo period. Authors may deposit new articles immediately upon publication and switch them to OA when the embargo period expires.
o Authors need no permission for preprint archiving. When they have finished writing the preprint, they still hold copyright. If a journal refuses to consider articles that have circulated as preprints, that is an optional journal-submission policy, not a requirement of copyright law. (Some journals do hold this policy, called the Ingelfinger Rule, though it seems to be in decline, especially in fields outside medicine.)
o If authors transfer copyright to a publisher, then OA archiving requires the publisher's permission. Most surveyed publishers (60+%) already give blanket permission for postprint archiving. Many others will do so on request, and nearly all will accommodate a mandatory green OA policy from the author's funder or employer. However, when authors retain the right to authorize green OA, then they may authorize green OA on their own without negotiating with publishers.
o When authors transfer copyright to publisher, they transfer the OA decision to publishers at the same tme. Even if most publishers allow green OA, many do not. In addition, many qualify their permission and some add new restrictions over time, such as fees or embargo periods. For these reasons there is a growing trend among scholarly authors to retain the right to provide green OA and only transfer the remaining bundle of rights to publishers. Some do this through author addenda which modify the publisher's standard copyright transfer agreement. Some funders (like the Wellcome Trust and NIH) require authors to retain key rights when publishing journal articles. At some universities (like Harvard and MIT) faculty have granted the university the non-exclusive right to provide OA to their work.
o Because rights-retention policies solve the green OA permission problem for future work, there's no need for green OA policies to create loopholes for dissenting publishers, for example requiring OA "subject to copyright" or "except when publishers do not allow it". There may be good reasons to create opt-outs for authors, as Harvard does, but there's no need to create opt-outs for publishers. When authors authorize OA while they are still the copyright holders, they needn't seek permission from publishers later on and needn't worry about infringement. Funders and universities are upstream from publishers and can adopt policies to ensure green OA and the permissions to make it lawful.
o Because most publishers already permit green OA, and because green OA is a bona fide form of OA, authors who fail to take advantage of the opportunity are actually a greater obstacle to OA than publishers who fail to offer the opportunity. Funders and universities are in a position to close the gap and ensure green OA for 100% of published work by their grantees and faculty. Because authors cannot close this gap on their own, funders and universities who fail to close the gap have no one else to blame if fast-rising journal prices enlarge the fast-growing fraction of new research inaccessible to those who need it. All publishers could help the process along and some are actually doing so. But there's no need to depend on publishers when we could depend on ourselves.
o For a searchable database of publisher policies about copyright and archiving, see Project SHERPA.
o Because most publishers and journals already give blanket permission for green OA, the burden is on authors to take advantage of the opportunity. This means that authors may publish in nearly any journal that will accept their work (OA or non-OA) and still provide OA to the peer-reviewed text through an OA repository. (Unfortunately, the compatibility of green OA with publishing in most non-OA journals is still one of the best-kept secrets of scholarly publishing.)
o The most useful OA repositories comply with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting, which makes them interoperable. In practice, this means that users can find a work in an OAI-compliant archive without knowing which archives exist, where they are located, or what they contain. (Confusing as it may be, OA and OAI are separate but overlapping initiatives that should not be mistaken for one another.)
o Every university in the world can and should have its own open-access, OAI-compliant repository and a policy to encourage or require its faculty members to deposit their research output in the repository. A growing number do precisely this.
o We can be confident that OA repositories are economically sustainable because they are so inexpensive. There are many systems of free and open-source software to build and maintain them. Depositing new articles takes only a few minutes, and is done by individual authors, not archive managers. In any case, OA repositories benefit the institutions that host them by enhancing the visibility and impact of the articles, the authors, and the institution.
o The two leading lists of OA repositories around the world are the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR).
o For news about OA repositories, follow the oa.repositories and oa.green tags at the OA Tracking Project.

* The OA project is constructive, not destructive.
o The purpose of the campaign for OA is the constructive one of providing OA to a larger and larger body of literature, not the destructive one of putting non-OA journals or publishers out of business. The consequences may or may not overlap (this is contingent) but the purposes do not overlap.
o Even though journal prices have risen four times faster than inflation since the mid-1980's, the purpose of OA is not to punish or undermine expensive journals, but to provide an accessible alternative and take full advantage of new technology —the internet— for widening distribution and reducing costs. Moreover, for researchers themselves, the overriding motivation is not to solve the journal pricing crisis but to deliver wider and easier access for readers and larger audience and impact for authors.
o Publishers are not monolithic. Some already provide full OA, some provide hybrid models, some are experimenting, and some are considering experiments. Among those not providing OA, some are opposed and some are merely unpersuaded. Among the unpersuaded, some provide more free online content than others. Among the opposed, some have merely decided not to provide it themselves, while others lobby actively against policies to encourage or require it. Some some oppose gold but not green OA, while others oppose green but not gold OA. OA gains nothing and loses potential allies by blurring these distinctions.
o Promoting OA does not require the boycott of any kind of literature, any kind of journal, or any kind of publisher. Promoting OA need not cause publisher setbacks, and publisher setbacks need not advance OA. To focus on undermining non-OA journals and publishers is to mistake the goal.
o Open-access and toll-access literature can coexist. We know that because they coexist now. We don't know whether this coexistence will be temporary or permanent, but the most effective and constructive way to find out is to work for OA and see what happens to non-OA providers, not to detour from building OA to hurt those who are not helping.

* Open access is not synonymous with universal access.
o Even after OA has been achieved, at least four kinds of access barrier might remain in place:
1. Filtering and censorship barriers. Many schools, employers, and governments want to limit what you can see.
2. Language barriers. Most online literature is in English, or just one language, and machine translation is very weak.
3. Handicap access barriers. Most web sites are not yet as accessible to handicapped users as they should be.
4. Connectivity barriers. The digital divide keeps billions of people, including millions of serious scholars, offline.
o Even if we want to remove these four additional barriers (and most of us do), there's no reason to hold off using the term "open access" until we've succeeded. Removing price and permission barriers is a significant plateau worth recognizing with a special name.

* OA is a kind of access, not a kind of business model, license, or content.
o OA is not a kind of business model.
+ There are many business models compatible with OA, i.e many ways to pay the bills so that readers can reach the content without charge. Models that work well in some fields and nations may not work as well in others. No one claims that one size fits all.
+ There are many differences among the disciplines that affect the funding of OA. We should not expect OA to make progress in all disciplines at the same rate, any more than we should expect it to make progress in all countries at the same rate. Most of the progress and debate is taking place in the STM fields (science, technology, and medicine), but OA is just as feasible and useful in the humanities.
+ New OA business models are evolving, and older ones are being tested and revised, all the time. There's a lot of room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal or a general-purpose OA repository, and we're far from having exhausted our cleverness and imagination. jjjkkk
o OA is not a kind of license. There are many licenses compatible with OA, i.e. many ways to remove permission barriers for users and let them know what they may and may not do with the content. See the sections on permission barriers and licenses above.
o OA is not a kind of content. Every kind of digital content can be OA, from texts and data to software, audio, video, and multi-media. The OA movement focuses on peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints. While most of these are just text, a growing number integrate text with images, data, and executable code. OA can also apply to non-scholarly content, like music, movies, and novels, even if these are not the focus of most OA activists.

* OA serves the interests of many groups.
o Authors: OA gives them a worldwide audience larger than that of any subscription-based journal, no matter how prestigious or popular, and demonstrably increases the visibility and impact of their work.
o Readers: OA gives them barrier-free access to the literature they need for their research, unconstrained by the budgets of the libraries where they may have access privileges. OA increases reader reach and retrieval power. OA also gives barrier-free access to the software they use in their research. Free online literature is free online data for software that facilitates full-text searching, indexing, mining, summarizing, translating, querying, linking, recommending, alerting, "mash-ups" and other forms of processing and analysis.
o Teachers and students: OA puts rich and poor on an equal footing for these key resources and eliminates the need for payments or permissions to reproduce and distribute content.
o Libraries: OA solves the pricing crisis for scholarly journals. It also solves what I've called the permission crisis. OA also serves library interests in other, indirect ways. Librarians want to help users find the information they need, regardless of the budget-enforced limits on the library's own collection. Academic librarians want to help faculty increase their audience and impact, and help the university raise its research profile.
o Universities: OA increases the visibility of their faculty and research, reduces their expenses for journals, and advances their mission to share knowledge.
o Journals and publishers: OA makes their articles more visible, discoverable, retrievable, and useful. If a journal is OA, then it can use this superior visibility to attract submissions and advertising, not to mention readers and citations. If a subscription-based journal provides OA to some of its content (e.g. selected articles in each issue, all back issues after a certain period, etc.), then it can use its increased visibility to attract all the same benefits plus subscriptions. If a journal permits OA through postprint archiving, then it has an edge in attracting authors over journals that do not permit postprint archiving. Of course subscription-based journals and their publishers have countervailing interests as well and often resist or oppose OA. But it oversimplifies the situation to think that all their interests pull against OA.
o Funding agencies: OA increases the return on their investment in research, making the results of the funded research more widely available, more discoverable, more retrievable, and more useful. When funding agencies disburse public funds, OA helps in a second way as well, by providing fundamental fairness to taxpayers or public access to the results of publicly-funded research.
o Governments: As funders of research, governments benefit from OA in all the ways that funding agencies do (see previous entry). OA also promotes democracy by sharing non-classified government information as widely as possible.
o Citizens: OA gives them access to peer-reviewed research, most of which is unavailable in public libraries, and gives them access to the research for which they have already paid through their taxes. But even those with no interest in reading this literature for themselves will benefit indirectly because researchers will benefit directly. OA accelerates not only research but the translation of research into new medicines, useful technologies, solved problems, and informed decisions that benefit everyone.

* OA in historical perspective:
o Scholarly journals do not pay authors for their articles, and have not done so since the first journals were launched in London and Paris in 1665. (See Jean-Claude Guédon, In Oldenburg's Long Shadow.)
o Journals took off because they were more timely than books. For readers, journals were better than books for learning quickly about the recent work of others. For authors they were better than books for sharing new work quickly with the wider world and for establishing priority over other scientists working on the same problem. Journals gave authors the benefit of a fast, public time-stamp on their work. Because authors were rewarded in these strong, intangible ways, they accepted the fact that journals couldn't afford to pay them. Over time, journal revenue grew but authors continued in the tradition of writing articles for impact, not for money.
o OA was physically and economically impossible in the age of print, even if the copyright holder wanted it. Prices were not only unavoidable for print journals, they were even affordable until the 1970's, when they began to rise faster than inflation. Journal subscription prices have risen nearly four times faster than inflation since 1986. Fortuitously, just as journal prices were becoming unbearable, the internet emerged to offer an alternative.
o It doesn't matter whether we blame unaffordable journals on excessive publisher prices or inadequate library budgets. If we focus on publishers, it doesn't matter whether we blame greed or innocent market forces (rising costs and new services). Blame is irrelevant and distracting. The volume of published knowledge is growing exponentially and will always grow faster than library budgets. In that sense, OA scales with the growth of knowledge and toll access does not. We've already (long since) reached the point at which even affluent research institutions cannot afford access to the full range of research literature. Priced access to journal articles would not scale with the continuing, explosive growth of knowledge even if prices were low today and guaranteed to remain low forever.
o The pricing crisis itself is just one factor in the rise of OA. Even if scholars did not turn to OA in order to bypass unaffordable access fees, they'd turn to it in order to take advantage of the internet as a powerful new technology for sharing knowledge instantly, with a worldwide audience, at zero marginal cost, in a digital form amenable to unlimited processing.
o For a schematic history of OA, see the OAD timeline of the OA movement.

Further reading

* Alliance for Taxpayer Access. From SPARC.
* Create Change. From ARL, ACRL, and SPARC.
* Creating an Information Commons Through Open Access. My longer, slower introduction to OA.
* Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS). From a group of European research institutions led by the Université de Liège.
* (Mis)Leading Open Access Myths. From BioMed Central.
* Open Access Directory (OAD). A wiki I co-founded with Robin Peek in April 2008. Some key OAD lists:
o Bibliography of Open Access.
o Blogs about OA.
o Declarations in support of OA.
o Discussion forums devoted to OA issues.
o Events. Conferences and workshops related to OA.
o Events celebrating Open Access Week.
o OA by the numbers.
o Timeline of the OA movement.
* Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS). From Leslie Chan and Alma Swan.
* Open Access Tracking Project (OATP). A real-time alert service I launched in April 2009.
* What you can do to promote open access. My old list, in need of updating.

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

[hlthe2b]

1. Do you really expect many here to read/digest that?

First of all, I'd think you were violating their copyright by not posting a mere couple of paragraphs....:shrug:

[kristopher]

2. Only if they are interested...

BTW, "This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ "

[hlthe2b]

3. re: open licensure: Good to know...

It just seems that if there is important information to be conveyed, you could summarize the pertinent points, but that's just me... I'm not disinterested, but reading technical jargon all day long at work, that is the last thing I want to do (especially in another field) at home... No insult intended.

[kristopher]

4. None taken.

That's why they write abstracts and executive summaries of articles. I included the long explanation from the website to demonstrate how the intent matters as well as to provide the mods with a ready quick reference.

[pipi_k]

5. That was sort of my thought, too

if I understand what you wrote, I mean....

wouldn't the whole problem of copyright infringement not even be an issue if people just provided a link and a short summary, in their own words, as to what the article is about?

[kristopher]

7. Try this

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm

The issue isn't the length nor the readers's desire nor how to snag the reader's attention. The issue is that there is a huge amount of copyrighted material that the authors WANT us to use for informing the public discussion on topics of complexity and great importance. Not only is it a great deal of unnecessary work to rewrite a summary for these open access technical papers, but it is almost always inferior to the original.

[Nihil]

11. Deleted - meant to be reply to OP not the sub-thread

:blush:

[SargeUNN]

6. This sounds like really good and interesting stuff but

honestly it is way too much. It would be more effective if it was shorter.

[Ozymanithrax]

8. For me, put a few (no more than three) pertinent paragraphs in block quotes...and add a link...

so readers can read the entire article. Then, write your own comments that draw a conclusion or disagree so you are not just dumping data.

It is better to create half a dozen short posts than to create one mega post.

No one should have to read the equivalent of war and peace to get to the point where we can comment.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. As a fomer mod, I would suggest that you put the note saying something is Open Access

in a visible place in the post, if you really think that the post will be significantly better if if excerpts more than the 4 paragraphs. That would be either at the start, or the end, and if it's not part of the article itself, but a general policy for the site, then it should be a link to the page which gives the policy. I would not want to make the mods have to maintain lists of which sources are meant to be Open Access. You, the poster, should say so each time you post it (I found it annoying, as a mod, to have to search around articles, which perhaps span multiple web pages, to find out if normal copyright is claimed, or if they allow some form of reproduction).

From a stylistic point of view for DU, I'd say that the "too long; didn't read" mentality is quite common among us (I haven't read your large quote, for instance, since when starting it, it didn't seem specific enough to the DU situation at hand), and there's a lot to be said for the practice of a few paragraphs and a link, just for readability. When you copy-and-paste, you lose a lot of formatting, and the result is rarely as readable as the original. If the article is detailed, it's often easier to have it in a separate tab/window if you're thinking of replying in DU to the thread, too.

[kristopher]

10. I generally agree with that.

At present I'm more interested in the issue of summaries and abstracts provided by the content owners. These are and long have been recognized as being produced explicitly for sharing the meat of the content without violating copyrights. However, the (very real) pressure appears to have prompted the mods to ignore anything but the commercial guidelines that the troglodytes are trying to ram down everyone's throats.

[Nihil]

12. Depends on the intended usage

Use of a brief abstract plus link is perfectly sufficient for most cases.

Use of an extended extract from an open access document might be useful
for the first time that the link has been published.

Use of multi-page mindless cut & pastes of exactly the same document
(open access or not) is deliberately spamming a thread with the sole
aim not of informing anyone but of shutting down the debate because
it is going in a direction that the spammer does not like.


You have a valid point with regard to highlighting the validity of an
open access document if it is provided to inform.

On the other hand, you cannot hide behind "EFF support" when the purpose
of the extended pasting of exactly the same material for the thousandth time
is purely to disrupt.

[RandomThoughts]

13. Disruption can not be looked at without the context of the system it disrupts.

If a system is bad, then disruption would be good. And if a system good disruption would be bad.


The northern army in the civil war, disrupted southern plantation life, just one example.

[Nihil]

14. The "context of the system" is a DU discussion forum and the rules are pretty clear:

>> Duplicate Topics and Spamming
>>
>> Do not post duplicate topics that have already been posted.
>> ...
>> Do not spam the message board by posting the same message repeatedly,
>> ...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/forums/rules_detailed.html

Whilst I agree with the principle in your post, it doesn't relate to
the subject under discussion.

:shrug:

[RandomThoughts]

15. You make a point there, I was thinking of it in a different context.

I do that sometimes.

I actually thought it was about the copyright system that is out of balance.

[TexasObserver]

16. This is the sort of thing best sent to the admins directly.

DU has a case in court, and anything the DU representatives write in this forum can be used in that case, potentially to DU's disadvantage. A lawyer's nightmare is waking up to "new facts" every day when a case is ongoing. Discussion of a case by a party or its representatives in a publicly available forum creates new facts.

It's likely the DU attorney has cautioned them about what should or should not be addressed on the boards by the DU ownership and management. The DU attorney doesn't want to be in the position to constantly peruse the DU management postings here to determine what new evidence they're creating.

I understand the DU ownership's need and desire to post some information on the progress of their lawsuit, including their counterclaim. In my view, they've got a winning case. I think DU will win this case.

Of course, DU has an attorney, and I am sure that attorney has told the ownership what should and should not be discussed. Understand that if DU's ownership has to ask their attorney to give them opinions every day based upon requests by posters, the costs of litigation for DU will skyrocket.

Right now, this case is well positioned for a quick resolution. Both sides can agree on what was published and the context of that publication. All that remains is a judge to make a call on the legal issues. Like I said, I think DU is going to win this.

Why mess with a pat hand? Why change anything in the way DU handles copyrighted material while this matter is pending? To do so is to create new facts that might not be helpful to a favorable resolution.

[Dover]

17. Are bloggers' writings considered copyrighted too? Or can they be reposted in their

entirety?

[Toucano]

18. Can someone please give me the Readers' Digest Version?

I hate to be a lazy sod, but such as things are...