So, if I understand Heather's last paragraph the concern appears to be that if somebody can become the sole supplier of CC-BY articles there is nothing to stop them from charging exorbitant prices for access. And this would be impossible if the articles were CC-BY-NC.
To see how this might work, let's imagine that I develop a fancy new service based on the CC-BY corpus currently available in PMC, but for my service to be attractive I need to ensure that the corpus of papers is only available through my service. What do I need to do to make this happen? 1. I need to get all of the CC-BY papers from PMC. That's easy - license allows me to do that. 2. I need to get PMC shut down. Little bit harder, but well I have lots of corporate lobbying power and governments have been known to withdraw services (especially in times of financial hardship), so possible. 3. Annoyingly, PMC is mirrored in Europe PMC. Slightly harder nut to crack as this has 17 funders from a number of different countries. Some funders are governmental, some charities, including the Wellcome Trust. But somehow or other I manage to convince them all to shut Europe PMC down. 4. So, all good. Except that all the papers are also on the original publisher sites. So I need to buy-up all of the OA publishers, or convince them to remove al CC-BY material from their sites. That's fine - I have deep pockets and they say everybody has a price. PLoS may be a little bit resistant, but I'n sure I can wear them down. 5. I now have exclusive control to all the CC-BY material is PMC. Oh, except all those papers that are also in institutional repositories worldwide. So my next job is to persuade administrators at a few hundred (thousand?) universities that they need to take down all of their CC-BY material. (Interesting aside - I wonder what % of CC-BY material in PMC is also in local university repositories.) 6. OK, I've done it. I've convinced the world's open access publishers, a number of governments, charities, and hundreds of universities to take down their content to allow me to have exclusive control. And I've down this quietly and surreptitiously cause if word gets out that this is what I'm doing you know that Peter Murray-Rust, Heather Piwowar, and a hundred other of those pesky data-miners are going to download the whole corpus and threaten to make it all available. 7. And that reminds me- what about people who have already done this? Who already have downloaded the corpus for data-mining. I'm going to have to somehow ensure that they never club together, buy a server and make the whole lot available to everybody. Looks like I'm going to be busy. If you think that the above is plausible then you may share Heather's concerns. For those of us who find it beyond far-fetched (and I haven't even addressed how you maintain monopoly access to CC-BY once you've managed to achieve it) then this remains the reddest of red herrings. David Begin forwarded message: > From: Heather Morrison <[email protected]> > Date: 14 March 2013 20:00:03 GMT > To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <[email protected]> > Subject: [GOAL] Re: Is CC-BY analogous to toll access? > Reply-To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <[email protected]> > > On 2013-03-14, at 12:09 PM, David Prosser wrote: > > Surely this is a red herring. Open access is about making the papers freely > available, not about making any services that can be built on top of them > freely (or 'cheaply', however we want to define 'cheaply') available. If > somebody can make a lot of money mining the literature and identifying the > ten exactly apposite papers for the problem a pharmaceutical company is > trying to solve then good luck to them! The ten papers are still going to be > open access. > > Comment > > This is just one example. To go back to my toll access analogy, that would be > like saying: "So what if people can take a few scholars' papers and sell > them. What can go wrong?" What can go wrong in the print world is that a few > commercial scholarly publishers end up making a great deal of money and > lobbying governments for policies and laws to protect their profits, even > when this is contrary to the purposes of scholarship. > > With respect to CC-BY as a default for scholarship: it's not just a few > papers that can be found, mined or sold. The whole corpus could be sold, with > value-added services available only to those willing to pay. A successful > business using this approach might well be inclined to view the free versions > as competition and lobby to remove their funding. > > best, > > Heather Morrison > > > _______________________________________________ > GOAL mailing list > [email protected] > http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
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