[Open-access] CC-BY

Thu Sep 5 05:07:41 UTC 2013

On 09/04/2013 10:56 PM, Mike Taylor wrote:
> Your argument in defence of Apple Academic Press seems to be "the 
> other kids are all doing it". That was never an argument that 
> impressed my mother, and it's not working on me, either. -- Mike. 

No, my argument is: "but mom, I only took one cookie to give it to 
little Ben after dinner, when Tom took the whole jar and ate all of the 
cookies right away! Why isn't he grounded, too?" Would that have 
impressed your mother? :-)

That's all I'm saying.

If you want to know what is *starting* to go around in my head as people 
keep pushing this minor issue, read below, but I don't recommend it :-)

Cheers,

Bjoern

--------------------------

This publisher takes my article and extends the reach of it? So what? I 
ought to be happy.
This publisher extends the reach of my work without my name on it? So 
what? It's not mine anyway, it's the tax payer's.
This publisher charges for their work extending the reach of 
taxpayer-funded research? So what? We all get paid for the work we do.
This publisher uses some of the money they charge to employ people and 
pay taxes? So what, that's what tax-funded research is supposed to do, 
at least according to the politicians.
This behavior violates the license under which the work is published? 
Well then perhaps we ought to change the license to make this behavior 
not violating it.

The more people keep pushing this issue, the more I'm starting to think 
that perhaps the right license for tax-funded research would be one 
where the authors are not allowed to be mentioned on re-use, but where 
'funded by the taxpayer' has to replace the author list.
Now there's a whole host of reasons why this isn't practicable, but in 
principle...

Just to re-emphasize: I can see why people are upset and from a 
traditional perspective their concerns are fully legitimate. I felt like 
that myself - we all have the subjective impression of ownership of our 
articles. What is *starting* to form in my head now is the suspicion 
that we might perhaps need to reconsider some of our priorities.

I don't think we serve the taxpayer by prioritizing the limitation of 
re-use. Perhaps, one of our priorities should be to demonstrate to 
authors that re-use is desirable, in *almost* whichever form.

I'm not saying pushing this issue promotes limiting re-use, not 
deliberately nor intentionally anyway, but look at Rosie's and some 
other posts: the effect this whole spat has is that people flock to NC, 
which one might consider counter-productive, or at least an unintended 
consequence? I suspect that potential competitors of Apple AP see these 
posts and discard this form of re-use right away instead of endorsing it 
and out-competing AAP (easy enough). Perhaps what we're doing here is 
even worse: perhaps we're closing the door to a whole market of 
selection and aggregation services that might evolve and would have been 
immensely beneficial had we not squelched it when it was in its infancy.