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

Fri Jan 31 15:03:47 UTC 2014

Between you and me ... (c) is rife in the world of vertebrate
palaeontology, where large collections of old but not-out-of-copyright
papers routinely circulate.

-- Mike.

On 31 January 2014 14:43, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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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