This is an excerpt from a new post on my blog which proposes a shift
from the detailed BBB definition of open access to Peter Suber's brief
definition, as follows: Open-access (OA) literature is digital,
online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing
restrictions (from Suber's Open Access Overview).
Rationale
In my dissertation, I map and analyze the relationship of open access
and various Creative Commons licenses and conclude that OA and CC
licenses, despite superficial similarities, simply do not map, and
that attempting to equate OA with a particular CC license such as CC-
BY is highly problematic for scholarship.
For a journal, I argue that the best way to express a journal's open
access status may well be the default Open Journal Systems (OJS)
statement, which reads: this journal provides immediate open access to
its content on the principle that making research freely available to
the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
This is an open definition in a very important sense: it leaves room
for scholars to consider, and experiment with, exactly what open
access can or should mean, or do for scholarship. We should be
articulating the commons - engaging in thinking about what a knowledge
commons might mean - not jumping to a quick technical solution such as
a particular CC license (acknowledging that the CC licenses, all of
them, are valuable tools for scholars). Some of the elements that we
should consider in articulating the commons include:
• the traditional concept of reciprocity that is an expectation with
gift-giving in many various societies, as reported by Mauss;
• developing a sustainable knowledge commons could benefit from the
research of Ostrom, for example the importance of developing community
expectations and sanctions in sustaining a commons; and,
• expanding the limitations of western concepts of ownership through
incorporating concepts from traditional knowledges.
The post goes on to dispel some common myths about CC-BY. In brief:
Creative Commons licenses are not like open access in that they are
not specific to works that are free of charge. Any of the CC licenses
can be used with toll access works.
CC-BY is not necessary, sufficient, or even desirable for data or text
mining.
CC-BY does not mean that a work will remain open access. A CC-BY copy
will always retain the CC-BY license, however the licensor can change
their mind and apply a different license anytime. One example of where
this could happen is if an open access publisher is sold to another
company; the buying company has no obligation to keep the works open
access.
Contrary to the opinions of some, there is NO emerging consensus on
the use of CC-BY. As of summer 2012, for example, only 11% of the
journals in DOAJ used CC-BY, and outside of the full open access
journals in DOAJ, use of the CC-BY license is even less common. All
faculty permissions open access policies specify that works are not to
be sold for a profit - this strongly suggests that researchers are not
wholly supportive of giving their works away for others to sell, as
with CC-BY.
More detail, and a link to the relevant section in my dissertation
with even more detail, can be found at:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/01/a-simple-definition-for-open-access_8.html
Respectful comments and questions are welcome and encouraged.
Heather Morrison, PhD
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
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