Open Access Archivangelism

In Newsweek, Brian Braiker discusses some interesting and important copyright, licensing and re-use issues -- about books re-using wikipedia material without attribution, about blogs posting published journal figures, about the re-use of free-culture text, photographs and music -- but it is important to understand that these are not Open Access (OA) issues.

OA primarily concerns the very special case of research articles published in peer-reviewed journals (about 2.5 million articles a year, in about 25,000 journals). All those articles, without exception, are (and always have been) author give-aways, written exclusively for maximal research usage and impact, not for royalty revenue. OA means making them freely accessible online to all would-be users webwide (for reading, downloading, storing, printing-off, data-crunching, using the findings in further research, building upon them, citing them -- but not necessarily for verbatim re-publication or re-posting of the text or figures -- beyond quoting limited verbatim text excerpts, with attribution, under "Fair Use": more than that still requires the author's permission).

OA does not require adopting a special CC attribution/re-use license (although if desired by the author and accepted by the publisher, such a license is always welcome). Nor does OA require the kinds of blanket mix-and-match re-use rights that teenagers might like to have for making and posting their own creative re-mixes out of commercial music or movies. That is a problem, but not an OA problem.

It is not even clear whether a blanket right to mix-and-match scientific content (even with attribution) would be a good thing. (Figures need not be re-posted, for example; the OA version can be linked; HTML even allows pinpoint linking to the specific figure rather than to the document as a whole.)

What sets OA's primary target apart is that it is an exception-free give-away corpus, wanting only to be read and used (but not necessarily re-published). It should not be conflated with or constrained by the needs of the much larger and more complicated and exception-ridden body of creative digital work of which it is merely a small, special subset.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum