Overselling the Importance and Urgency of CC-BY/CC-BY-NC for Peer-Reviewed Scholarly and Scientific Research

I think there has been a vast overstatement and overselling of the alleged need for -- and urgency of -- re-use rights (CC-BY) (or NC) for peer reviewed research journal articles today, especially in view of the fact that CC-BY (or NC) is much harder to get journal publishers to agree to, today, and not all (perhaps not even most) authors and disciplines need or want it, today.

Consider that if a subscription publisher were to allow CC-BY, that would authorize any 3rd-party rival publisher to free-ride with impunity on the publisher's investment, selling the publisher's contents at a cut-rate from the very day of publication. So asking subscription publishers for unembargoed Green Libre OA (CC-BY, or CC-BY NC, etc.) rather than just unembargoed Green Gratis OA is tantamount to asking them to commit immediate suicide, hence likely to provoke them instead to adopt as long a protective embargo as possible against Green Libre OA.

Re-use rights (Libre OA) -- just like Gold OA -- will come, after Green Gratis OA, where needed and wanted. But neither is even remotely as important or urgent as (Gratis) OA itself today: free online access to the journal articles of which 80% are accessible only to subscribers today.

Gratis OA means free online access, reading, linking, downloading, printing, storing, and data-mining locally, as well as harvesting, inverting and indexing of navigation and research by Google Scholar and countless other search engines).

Green Gratis OA is the solution to providing the missing 80% of OA. All that's needed is to mandate it.

But insisting now on Libre OA (further re-use rights), just like insisting now on Gold OA, is simply demanding still more, and thereby raising higher the obstacles to getting the 80% Green OA (Gratis) that is already within reach and has been for years through Green (Gratis) OA self-archiving mandates by researchers' institutions and funders (as so brilliantly described and spear-headed by Professor Bernard Rentier in his recent GOAL posting).

And all in the name of further benefits that are not even remotely as important and urgent as Green Gratis OA.

Consider that there is a practical contradiction between trying to expand Green OA mandates from funders and institutions to 100% and insisting on Libre OA (e.g., CC-BY, etc.) today.  

For not one of the world's Green OA mandates, whether funder of institutional, is a Libre OA mandate -- and with good reason: Green OA mandates are a research-community adaptation to the publisher status quo: 

Publication is still largely subscription-based today, and copyright is mostly transferred to publishers (rather than being non-exclusively licensed, as we of course want it to be, eventually). That's the status quo. 

And self-archiving of the author's refereed final draft is the research community's own self-help response, within this publisher status quo.

The result is Green Gratis OA; that is the thing that the research community needs the most today. That is what maximizes research access, uptake, usage, applications and impact by making it accessible to all users, not just those whose institutions can afford subscription access. But Green Gratis OA is only at about 20% worldwide today, because so few institutions and funders have as yet mandated it.

Opening up the Libre OA front, alongside the Gold OA front, instead of pushing full-speed on the all-important Green Gratis OA-mandating front toward 100% Green Gratis OA is simply adding further obstacles, handicaps and distractions to the Green Gratis OA front -- as well as providing an unscalable model that most other countries will not want (or be able) to follow today.

And the most important thing to keep in mind is that these further obstacles, handicaps and distractions are nowhere near as important and urgent as (Green, Gratis) OA itself. (Not to mention that the fastest and surest way to get eventual Libre OA as well as Gold OA is to first mandate Green Gratis OA universally.)

I think it would be practical, realistic and helpful to make it clear to all OA advocates that the primary, immediate, and already fully reachable target is 100% Green Gratis OA, and that the re-use rights and the Gold OA can and will come later, after this urgent primary goal is reached, but will only make it gratuitously harder to reach if they are needlessly insisted upon in advance.

A word to the wise.

I close by re-quoting the spot-on and timely words of Professor Rentier in his recent GOAL posting [emphasis added]:

"...I have mandated deposit in my University's repository (ORBi) and since there is no way I can force my colleagues to "obey", I have just made official a procedure whereby the only publication list being considered in a Liege University member's C.V. is the one produced by ORBi. Simple. This explains ORBi's success... Of course, this does not solve the question of immediate open access. Only those papers published by publishers who agree upon immediate access on line are immediately accessible on line. The others must be immediately deposited but cannot be seen fully upon publication. They must await the end of the publishing house's embargo period, 6 months for most of them. Meanwhile, the title and metadata appear on any search engine by keywords, authors' names, University, etc. and a single click sends [an immediate eprint] request to the author. There are a few minutes to a few hours before the final author version is sent: it depends on the author's availability and response time. Usually less that 24 hours unless the author is on a weeklong trek in Nepal.... Compliance... has been very high, at first because of the soft but firm coercive top down pressure, but nowadays because our authors have fully realised the very much larger readership with which OA provides them and the citation advantage from which they benefit. My most reluctant colleagues have now become ORBi's best advocates. I consider this a success. OA's worst enemy out there is OA [fundamentalism]…"

Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model

The Liège ORBi model: Mandatory policy without rights retention but linked to assessment procedures

EOS: New worldwide organization for universities promoting open access

Repositories: Institutional, Thematic, or Central?

Liege Mandate Definitely Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access

Stevan Harnad