Dear GOAL readers, This thread, started by Lucie Burgess of Oxford University, seems to be a good place to gain a better understanding of the "Oxford Open<http://www.oxfordjournals.org/en/oxford-open/index.html>" initiative of Oxford University Press (OUP). Starting in 2015, OUP became the publisher of the journals of the Entomological Society of America (ESA). These included ESA's four peer-reviewed subscription journals that date back to 1908, 1908, 1968, and 1972. Prospective authors of these four journals who want OA are now informed that they will be granted copyrights to their articles but will be required to sign OUP's License to Publish<http://entnemdept.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/OUP_License_to_Publish.pdf> immediately afterward. At the time they are granted their copyrights they must choose one of three CC licenses. On the web page<https://aesa.oxfordjournals.org/for_authors/charges-licenses-and-self-archiving.html> where prospective authors might learn about the implications of choosing among the three licenses, the three licenses are listed (CC-BY , CC-BY-NC , CC-BY-NC-ND) and their prices given (either of the last two costs $500 less than the first). Authors learn nothing about why some authors might choose to buy the more expensive license or what benefits they might lose if they choose one of the two that cost less. In email exchanges, ESA's Director of Publications suggested that, from an author's viewpoint, there were no significant differences among the licenses but did indicate that most authors bought the cheaper ones.
I know that the CC-BY license is required by many funders who want the results of the research they sponsor to be as widely available as possible but am unsure whether signing OUP's License to Publish can take back or nullify any authors' privileges that they would have had if they had not signed it. Question Under FURTHER INFORMATION on p.2 of OUP's License to Publish<http://entnemdept.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/OUP_License_to_Publish.pdf> are many restrictions that authors would see no reason to violate, but would it be illegal (as opposed to unethical) if an author knowingly violated any of them? I will appreciate any help that GOAL members may offer. Tom ==================================== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu Phone: 352-273-3920 Web: http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/ ==================================== From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Lucie Burgess Sent: Wednesday, February 10, 2016 2:55 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Do libraries fight to preserve the public domain? Dear Peter, I wanted to respond to the point you made that: 'So the moral is that University libraries do not fight to preserve the public domain or CC-BY*. In a sad extension of this many libraries (including the British Library - whom I FOI'ed) will take the easy way and apply charges for everything because it is too difficult to determine whether anything is in the public domain or CC-BY*. Thus the BL charges people to read my Open Access papers online, and 120-year old chemical publications are regarded as belonging to the journal (and hence chargeable) because they can't prove the authors are dead.' In my experience, it is really not the case that University libraries do not fight to preserve the public domain. Our readers understandably demand online access to materials which they can otherwise only see by visiting a reading room. We respond to this by digitising the materials to make them digitally available. Unfortunately, digitisation is expensive, and the fact is, that library budgets are under pressure everywhere. One way in which libraries have responded to reader demands for online access, is by signing time-limited, non-exclusive deals with commercial publishers in which the publishers invest in digitisation (at no cost, or very low cost to the library) and a licence is signed with the publisher to provide commercial access to the content. Therefore online access is charged for to the end-user, for a limited period of time, to enable the publisher to re-coup their investment and make a return (which is necessary otherwise they would not be incentivised to invest). It is not the case that the access is put behind a paywall because rights can't be cleared. Quite the opposite, substantial time and due diligence is carried out to ensure that the copyright status of the underlying content can be clarified before digitisation takes place so that the rights of the underlying rights holder are not infringed, if indeed the material is in copyright. After a period of time, usually 10-15 years, the digitised materials are then made freely available for all under an open licence, again usually CC-BY or CC-0. Without such innovative commercial agreements, libraries would not be able to afford the costs of investment in digitisation and their collections would remain in analogue form, for only those with a reader's card to use, in a reading room in the library. I do understand that this is contentious to some, but in my experience such commercial agreements enable huge collections to be digitised which otherwise would be restricted by their physical nature, and then after a period of time the public domain is preserved. One such example is the Bodleian Libraries' EEBO-TCP (Early English Books Text Creation Partnership) digitisation and transcription project with Proquest, in which the first 25,000 transcribed texts have recently been released into the public domain: http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-eebo/ and http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/eebotcp/ In this case the underlying analogue texts were very clearly in the public domain to begin with, so due diligence of the copyright status was not necessary, but the investment required to digitise the entire corpus would have been £millions. In my opinion, these kinds of agreements have the potential to transform scholarship by giving online access that otherwise would be simply unaffordable for libraries to deliver. I can't comment on the British Library access to your papers because I don't know the details, but I will forward your query to colleagues at the British Library to respond to. Thanks and kind regards, Lucie Lucie Burgess Associate Director for Digital Libraries Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford Clarendon Building, Broad Street, Oxford Senior Research Fellow, Hertford College Tel: +44 (0)1865 277104 +44 (0)7725 842619 Twitter @LucieCBurgess LinkedIn LucieCBurgess http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6601-7196 Get ready for the REF - Act on Acceptance<http://openaccess.ox.ac.uk/home-2/act-on-acceptance/> From: Peter Murray-Rust <pm...@cam.ac.uk<mailto:pm...@cam.ac.uk>> Reply-To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal@eprints.org<mailto:goal@eprints.org>> Date: Wednesday, 10 February 2016 15:57 To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal@eprints.org<mailto:goal@eprints.org>> Subject: [GOAL] Re: Can time-stamped PDF's qualify as OA? On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 2:51 PM, Walker,Thomas J <t...@ufl.edu<mailto:t...@ufl.edu>> wrote: Peter Murray-Rust's posting about $400 study packs based on articles published with CC-BY rights statements opened my eyes to a part of OUP/ESA's business plan I had missed-the use of time-stamped PDFs to make money from students of the teachers who use study packs that include articles by ESA authors in any of ESA's four principal journals. OUP has slapped time stamps and notices of an ESA copyright on all articles in the four journals going back to 1908 for Ann. Ent. Soc. Amer. and J. Econ. Ent, and to 1972 and 1965 for J. Med. Ent. and Envir. Ent. This should be illegal, as well as ethically and morally unacceptable. It's called Copyfraud by many, including me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud gives a good overview. It's a "victimless crime" for Universities and their libraries, because the victims are not the Universities but hoi polloi outside the ivory towers. The people who suffer are artists, naturalists, policy makers, SMEs, doctors, politicians, and curious minds. This is because ESA has no valid claim of copyright to articles published in its journals before it started requiring authors to sign over their copyrights to ESA in 1978. Furthermore, JME, for its entire run of being published by Honolulu's Bishop Museum (1964-1986), never required authors to sign copyright releases. The handover of J. Med. Ent. to ESA resulted in the run from 1987-date being copyrighted by ESA. The magnitude of the deception of OUP claiming an ESA copyright on all articles that ever appeared in ESA's four journals is that of ESA's 271 "journal-years" of publication (through 2015 and including the first 22 journal-years of JME), ESA could fairly claim copyright to only 103 (103/271=38%). That ought to be illegal, but is it? (The evidence is clear cut and online.) I suffered from this. Springer took all the images published in its journals and stamped COPYRIGHT SPRINGER over all of them and offered them for sale at 60 USD. This included all my publications in BioMedCentral, a CC-BY Open Access journal. I raised this on my blog as "Springergate", see https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/06/06/springergate-springerimages-for-today/ and preceding/subsequent articles. I publicized this - was dismissed by Springer first of all and then it was a "computer glitch" . No one in academia cared. However Wikimedia cared greatly, because their CC-BY-SA images had also been universally stamped as Springer property. They made a considerable fuss, rightly (explore the blog). The Editor of BMC then spent time correcting it (it wasn't his fault, it was SpringerImages). So the moral is that University libraries do not fight to preserve the public domain or CC-BY*. In a sad extension of this many libraries (including the British Library - whom I FOI'ed) will take the easy way and apply charges for everything because it is too difficult to determine whether anything is in the public domain or CC-BY*. Thus the BL charges people to read my Open Access papers online, and 120-year old chemical publications are regarded as belonging to the journal (and hence chargeable) because they can't prove the authors are dead. P. Tom ==================================== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu<mailto:t...@ufl.edu> Phone: 352-273-3920<tel:352-273-3920> Web: http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/ ==================================== -- 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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