[open-science] [okfn-discuss] "Open Access" publications under CC-NC licences

[Peter Murray-Rust]

Ross has done a great job on surveying publishers - about 30 rows out of
115 and some of these are nor relevant. I have renamed the spreadsheet and
some fields to "gratisOA" because it is more informative than "fakeOA".

The situation is far worse than I thought. Author-paid and funder-paid
hybrid Open Access is almost universally not OA-libre (only one of 30 was
libre-OA (Amer Phys Soc). Fees range from 1000 USD to 5000 USD (though this
is based on very few). the Commonest licence is CC-NC (or variants). A few
publishers don't mention licences and try to express this in web-page
prose.

We are at a critical point. If this continues, even for a few months, we'll
universally have paid "OpenAccess" that does not meet the Open Definition.
Most pubishers are not "Open Access" publishers in that they don't have
Open Access (gold) journals so they will come to see the acceptable level
of paid "Open Access"  as CC-NC. (A licence that is neither Open nor
operable and may be retired by CC). The result will be a sludge of
non-interoperable articles and either a series of individual squabbles of
funders with publishers or a resignation that non-libre-OA is all that the
Open Access movement can achieve. It will then spend billions of dollars on
a product of little value.

At least the OKF, if no-one else, understands. Our immediate goal is to
summarise the position objectively. Then we can present this to funders and
government.

We urgently need more volunteers. That means you. I'd guess that the total
amount of time is < 1 hour per publisher. (It clearly is for Ross as he has
done 30 in less than 30 hours elapsed). That's perhaps 50 hours across the
whole of OKF readers. You don't have to be a scientist to do it - just be
prepared to look at endless websites.

P.

-- 

> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
>



-- 
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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