[open-science] SPARC author addendum uses CC-NC licence and now all hybrid publishers have followed

Sun Dec 11 20:22:21 UTC 2011

On 11 December 2011 19:37, Heather Morrison <heatherm at eln.bc.ca> wrote:

> If Springer Open becomes a wild success and eventually Springer goes full
> CC-BY for all of their journals, then anyone can take Springer journals and
> re-sell them. Imagine if Elsevier were to take these journals and sell
> them, but not sharealike, then Elsevier could sell a version of Science
> Direct that includes all of the Springer journals

But what would be the point? If access to those (Springer) journals is free
anyway, it does Elsevier no good to 'sell' access to them. If anything, it
increases the impact of those journals by reminding researchers to look at
them.

In terms of ad revenue, "it's open access, but you have to access it here"
doesn't seem really open at all. What if, for example, you have a tool to
scan new papers for keywords, find interesting ones, and automatically
download the PDF to your library? You're not going to see any of the
publisher's ads*. I know publishers need some source of income, but I don't
think they can or should be relying on ad revenue.

* Please, please, nobody suggest that publishers embed ads in PDFs of
academic papers. I feel dirty for even thinking of such an abomination.

Thomas
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