[Open-access] scholarly articles still not in OA. What could we do?

[Peter Murray-Rust]

I fully understand. It's not just in HSS. Chemical papers 100 years old are
still useful. And certainly i observational biology.

It's worth using the OAButton - if only to reduce your blood pressure. It
may also highlight the problem - if OAButton can count the ages of the
papers that might show your problem was common.

The forces for change could be (a) legislation. (b) a change in the
publishing market. Neither are fast. (c) Civil disobedience would also
work.



On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 2:17 PM, Bjoern Brembs <b.brembs at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Friday, January 31, 2014, 3:03:56 PM, you wrote:
>
> > But I am under the impression that this fight tends to forget
> > former journals, old papers, etc. some of which are, at
> > least in social sciences, still relevant and useful. Could
> > we launch a sort of a campaign "OA for now, but also OA to
> > the past", in order to entice researchers to put all their
> > old papers in OA? Or support libraries that could do it
> > with their old collections or older series? Maybe this is
> > already in the make and I am not aware of it?
>
> This is something that I think should be solvable in principle.
> Copyright expires after a number of years. Depending on several factors,
> this can be 28 years, 70 years, 95 years or 120 years. So in most cases, a
> 1994 article is still protected by copyright and is just as difficult to
> make OA as any other copyrighted, more recent article.
>
> But I agree with you that libraries should try and harvest everything,
> independent of its protection and make available everything that is legal
> to make available.
> I would really like to see how one would apply copyright law to determine
> which articles in the scholarly literature could be seen as publicly
> accessible at this point in time and what percentage of the scholarly
> literature this would be.
> Does anybody know someone who could answer this question, ideally in paper
> form for our special issue? :-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bjoern
>
>
>
>
> --
> Björn Brembs
> ---------------------------------------------
> http://brembs.net
> Neurogenetics
> Universität Regensburg
> Germany
>
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-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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