Open letter to the Society for Neuroscience

Insights: the UKSG journal, 2013

Copyright in the digital environment is evolving at an unprecedented rate. Copyright exists to protect the rights of an owner of an original piece of work by imposing restrictions on re-use but it does not always fit well with how we use and share information in the digital sphere. The growth of open access (OA) publishing has also added to the challenge as the right to reuse as well as read content has been emphasized. Creative Commons (CC) licences were introduced to try and bridge the gaps between the barriers imposed by traditional copyright and the realities of the digital environment but, as they are general licences, it is not always clear how they apply to specific situations. This article addresses some of the key questions around how the various licences can be applied in academic publishing, what some of the consequences are, and how they affect different research areas.

In the last round of author-sharing policy revisions, Elsevier created a labyrinthine title-by-title embargo structure requiring embargoes from 12 to 48 months for authors sharing via institutional repository (IR), while permitting immediate sharing via an author’s personal website or blog. At the same time, all prepublication versions are to bear a Creative Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) license. At the time this policy was announced, it was criticized by many in the scholarly communication community as overly complicated and restrictive. However, this CC licensing requirement creates an avenue for subverting an embargo in the IR to achieve quicker and wider open distribution of the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM). To wit, authors may post an appropriately licensed copy on their personal site or blog, at which point the author’s host institution may deposit without an embargo in the IR, not through the license granted in the publication agreement, but through the CC license on the author’s version, which the sharing policy mandates. This article outlines the background and rationale of the issue and discusses the benefits, workflows, and remaining questions.

2012

Abstract Copyright and licensing of scientific data, internationally, are complex and present legal barriers to data sharing, integration and reuse, and therefore restrict the most efficient transfer and discovery of scientific knowledge. Much data are included within scientific journal articles, their published tables, additional files (supplementary material) and reference lists. However, these data are usually published under licenses which are not appropriate for data.

Open access (OA) is a concept that in recent years has acquired popularity and widespread recognition. International statements and scholarly analysis converge on the following main characteristics of open access: free availability on the public Internet, permission for any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, and link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, and use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself. The only legal constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

2023

More than 2.5 billion open access licensed scientific articles are available on the internet to date-an indication of the sentiment among an increasingly global scientific community when it comes to knowledge transfer and scientific dissemination. These shifts are indicative of the current state of academic publishing, dominated by commercial publishers that appear to disproportionately profit from scholars' intellectual creations to the detriment of not-for profit university presses and in spite of publication costs having drastically decreased as digitalisation of literary works continues to grow. While alternatives to traditional publication models continue to be explored, scientific authors have increasingly shown a preference for the deployment of so-called Rights Retention strategies to reproduce scientific works: the ability to share copyright-protected works by means of publicly available licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses, even in the presence of a copyright transfer agreement with commercial publishers. Open access dissemination of scientific findings has revealed a number of contentious, namely, how to maintain the integrity of author's moral rights to their work, preventing plagiarism and facilitating the indirect commercialisation of works readily available in the open access ecosystem. We consider these issues by exploring the legal-philosophical foundations of open access, grounding our analysis in Kantian ideas of public and private use of reason. Through this lens, we argue that, for all its potential pitfalls, open access has the ability to delicately balance the interests of all involved stakeholders-including those of commercial publishers. We suggest that open access, in its variety of forms, including the use of Creative Commons licences and Rights Retention, allows for reciprocal, bifurcated copyright arrangements that display the ability of authors to honour contractual obligations with commercial publishers on the one hand, while openly disseminating their scientific findings to the public at large on the other hand, thus adding nuance and complexity to an emerging new copyright law-one that embraces principles of equity and inclusion, while being fit for purpose in light of rapid technological advances.

Emerging Topics in Life Sciences

Copyright provides the creator of an original work, such as a journal article or a scientific poster, with exclusive rights to authorize and reproduction and sharing copies of the work. Issues regarding copyright have become more prominent as digital technologies have made copying and distributing information easier. In a research environment, there is ample opportunity to share print and electronic resources among colleagues, which may represent noncompliance with copyright law. The desire to remove the paywall from the published literature has led to several versions of open access (OA), differentiated by the fees charged to the author as article processing charges, where the article is stored, and when the published article becomes freely available as OA. A number of government agencies and major research funders in the U.S.A. and the EU have implemented specific guidelines as to where and how their funded research can be published. Although OA publications can be read for free, ...

2006

Open access to the scientific literature remains a controversial area. To adequately summarize the different arguments and opinions on the matter could easily fill an entire book (Willinsky, 2005). In this commentary, we present the perspective of an open access publisher. Since BioMed Central launched its pioneering open access journals in 2000, massive progress has been made toward opening up the scientific literature.

Policy Futures in Education, 2006

and research environments. OA aims to promote greater and more efficient access to educational and research materials and has an international profile. This article will overview the basic charter of OA and explain how it proposes to transform academic communication and publishing in an online world. Importantly, this article will also overview the legal issues that surround the move towards OA and the concept of Open Content Licensing (including the Creative Commons Project).

The American journal of clinical nutrition, 2003

It is the sense of Congress that any Federal department or agency that enters into funding agreements should make every effort to develop and support mechanisms for making the published results of the research freely and easily available to the scientific community, the private sector, physicians, and the public" (1). So reads HR 2613, Public Access to Science, a bill before the US House of Representatives that is sponsored by Representative Martin Sabo of Minnesota and that, if enacted, would place all published work that is "substantially funded" by agencies of the US government "beyond the reach of copyright protection so that they will be freely available for the benefit of the people of the United States" (1). This bill would run counter to Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution (2), which gives Congress the responsibility to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." However, because scientific discoveries by US government employees are considered "works for hire" and are not protected by copyright (3), HR 2613, also known as the Sabo bill, would simply broaden the definition of "works for hire" to include any scientific discovery supported by US government funds. The elimination of copyright rights and the free availability of published works are at the core of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which will be launching an online journal in October 2003. The purpose of the PLoS is to provide "immediate, free and unrestricted access" of all its contents to the scientific community and the public (4). On the face of it, the interacting concepts of copyright elimination and open access might appear as a rational and solid foundation for the most timely and widest dissemination of new scientific knowledge to humanity. Yet these concepts are strongly opposed by the established scientific publishing community because they could produce the exact opposite result-distortion of scientific findings and increased public confusion. This editorial will examine each concept from the point of view of our solidly established, relatively small, financially solvent specialty journal, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN), which is supported by a society, the American Society for Clinical Nutrition, Inc (ASCN), which has clear goals of promoting nutrition education in medical schools and advancing scientifically proven knowledge of human and clinical nutrition. The AJCN is in a somewhat unique position because the scientific discoveries we publish are for the most part directly related to an area of huge public interest and commercial enterprise: the relation of diet to health and disease.