Open Access Archivangelism

Re: Copyright: the immoveable barrier that open access advocates underestimated (Richard Poynder)

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Let’s simplify:

1. Stick to peer-reviewed research articles: that’s all FOA is or was ever about.

2. Copyright and re-use rights are and always have been a red herring in the FOA age.

3. All that’s needed is an FOA version of the peer-reviewed research article.

4. That’s the author’s peer-reviewed final draft.

5. The only thing needed from “journals” (or equivalent) is the adjudication and certification of the peer review.

6. That’s a service, not a product: Nothing to “copyright.”

7. To make the current house of copywrit (sic) cards collapse, all authors need do is make 4 (the author’s peer-reviewed final draft FOA (freely accessible online)

8. FOA immediately (upon “acceptance”) and permanently (“FIPATRAFTO”).

9. For the faint-hearted and superstitious, there’s the Copy-Request Button during any (bogus) publisher “embargo” on “OA.”

10. Like Copyright worries (2), Button worries are red herrings.

11. FOA is all that’s needed or was ever needed.

12. Once researchers, their institutions and their funders get round to providing FOA (= “Green, Gratis OA”), Fair Gold “OA” (peer-review service fees) and all the re-use rights researchers need will be within trivial reach.

(Waiting for researchers, their institutions and their funders to get their heads around this and to set their fingers in motion continues to be yawningly boring; please wake me when they get round to it...)

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Charles Oppenheim:
Stevan is not quite correct. Copyright IS relevant because the authors foolishly agree to assign (or give an exclusive licence) it to the publisher. For Stevan's proposal to work, they must stop doing that. If a researcher has foolishly given away that right, Stevan's No 7 onwards in principle cannot work. So amend Stevan's 12 point plan by adding a final sentence to his point 6, "UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD THE AUTHOR ASSIGN COPYRIGHT TO THE PUBLISHER, OR GRANT IT AN EXCLUSIVE LICENCE TO THE WORK". Then his plan is legally watertight. I do agree with Stevan's final thoughts in brackets. I too am waiting.....

Stevan Harnad: Charles’s formal caveats are quite correct — for pedants and poltroons. But think: if the physicists in 1991 (or the computer scientists even earlier) had had the slightest inclination to give such reservations a single moment’s credence — instead of going ahead and doing exactly what they did (self-arxiving their preprints, and then their refereed final drafts, immediately, and not bothering with the publisher’s “version of record”), FOA would never have made even the modest strides it has made:

So let’s stop fussing about copyright and start self-archiving all our refereed final drafts immediately upon acceptance for publication! It’s 2017, almost 3 decades since good sense first erupted and prevailed in some intrepid subsets of the research community. Coraggio!

Apart from that (which should be done in any case), Charles is also right that it is foolish (and unnecessary) to assign copyright or grant an exclusive license to the publisher. The limited right to publish and sell the version of record, online and on paper, is more than right enough — and as much reward as they deserve for their one and only “value-added,” which is the administration of the peer review (which the peers provide for free, just as the author provides the text for free).