Re: NIH Public Access Mandate Passes Senate

[Jan Velterop <velteropvonleyden@btinternet.com>]

We are often required to share what we 'own'. We often neither 
can't, nor wish to, avoid sharing what we own. Mark Lemley has 
written interesting things about this:

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=582602>

I don't think anyone argues for authors to give up the moral 
right to their work, but making their work accessible to the 
public could be seen as a reasonable requirement to 'pay back' 
the public for having had the privilege of receiving public funds 
to do their research.

The requirement, however, is not just to make their work publicly 
available. That would be easy and can be done by any researcher 
with an internet connection with negligible, if any, extra cost 
(other than a little time). The requirement is explicitly to have 
their work published in a peer-reviewed journal and then to make 
it publicly available, with the 'badge of acceptance by the 
scientific community' that publishing in such journals conveys, 
attached to it.

In organising and enabling the acquisition of that 'badge' is 
where publishers play a role, provide a service. The provision of 
that service requires effort, the value of that 'badge' needs 
development, which costs time and investment, and somehow those 
things need to be paid for. Traditionally, this is done via 
subscriptions (essentially 'monetising' the copyright that is 
transferred by the author to the publisher), but novel, more 
straightforward, ways of paying for that service have emerged in 
the form of article processing charges, a system of financial 
support for journals that can have open access as quite a natural 
outcome.

Embargoes are limiting the value of the copyright that is 
transferred to the publisher as 'payment' for the service 
rendered, as well as decreasing the incentive for authors to pay 
for article processing charges. A portion of subscribers (the 
size of which will differ by discipline and quite possibly grow 
over time) will decide they can afford to wait until after the 
embargo is over, and a portion of authors (the size of which will 
also differ by discipline) will decide they can also easily wait 
until the embargo is elapsed. So- called 'green' is having a 
similar effect.

In those scenarios, it will only be a matter of time before 
journals will start refusing articles that come neither with the 
transfer of sufficiently valuable copyright (read: sufficiently 
valuable exclusive rights), nor with money. In fact, 
professionally run OA journals already do just that: they don't 
consider articles that don't come with payment (with the possible 
exception of a small and affordable number of articles coming 
from truly impecunious authors, as long as that number stays 
small and affordable).

Nobody may care about the journals and publishers, but it is 
pretty tough on authors to require them to deliver open access 
for their published papers whilst at the same time depriving them 
of the financial means to get them published, or, as seems to be 
the case, leaving them in limbo in that regard. And the burden of 
this requirement on authors without explicitly providing the 
relief of means to pay for publication in one way or another, is 
not exactly a stimulus for traditional publishers to convert to 
OA, or even for OA publishers to expand their capacity quickly. 
The Wellcome Trust and HHMI have understood that better.

Jan Velterop

On 29 Oct 2007, at 23:08, Rick Anderson wrote:

>> 1.  Do you believe an author should have the right to 
>> ownership of his or her own work?  That right would include 
>> the ability to charge for access if anyone is interested in 
>> participating in a market.  Or should an author (at least of 
>> scholarly materials) have no presumption that he or she owns 
>> his written work?
>
> This isn't a binary issue -- that authors either do or don't 
> have the right to do what they wish with their work.  I think 
> it's reasonable to argue that, yes, authors generally do have 
> the right to ownership of their work, but that they can still 
> be required to do certain specific things with that work when 
> the work was funded by the public purse.  If the public has 
> funded the work, then it's reasonable for the public to be 
> given some level of access to it.
>
> After that, it becomes a question of degree.  Should everyone 
> in the world get unlimited free access from the moment of the 
> work's creation, or should there be some kind of embargo that 
> leaves the author the option of giving exclusive rights to a 
> publisher on a temporary basis? This is what the proposed 
> policy would allow, and it seems like a reasonable compromise 
> to me.
>
> ---
> Rick Anderson
> Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
> Marriott Library
> University of Utah
> rick.anderson@utah.edu