Open-access policy scrapes the barrel

McQuillan expresses what is becoming a common fear of leaving out the 'non-commercial' (NC) rule from a Creative Commons licence. The fear is misplaced as in fact Disney, TimeWarner, and Pearsons have no interest in taking open access scholarship, repackaging it and selling it for a profit. How could they, since the stuff is already available for free? All that an NC limitation prevents is reuse and promotion of one's work by small, independent websites that happen to cover their costs by running adverts. That is, the NC rule prevents scholarship being recirculated by the very people McQuillan probably wants to encourage. Everyone currently using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence should immediately switch to an Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) licence, if they want their work to be more widely circulated and discussed. McQuillan is right that current publishing arrangements give authors a "say in the dissemination of their work". The poor choices made by academic authors in this regard--typically treating their outputs as personal property rather than as things the public has paid them to produce--are largely to blame for the very low public readership of scholarly writing.

THE ESSENTIALS OF OPEN ACCESS It is rather difficult to extract a coherent position or proposal from Professor McQuillan's rather impressionistic account of open-access goings-on. Let me try to summarize the essentials: Open access (OA) is PRIMARILY about making peer-reviewed journal articles in all disciplines freely accessible online to all users, rather than just to those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they were published. There are two ways for authors to provide OA: (1) GOLD OA: Publishing in a peer-reviewed journal that makes its articles free for all online (often by charging the author for publishing). (2) GREEN OA: Self-archiving, free for all online, articles published in peer-reviewed subscription-based journals. UK universities and RCUK had been leading the worldwide OA movement since 2003 in mandating (requiring) Green OA, although most of the mandates have not yet been very effective, for lack of a compliance monitoring and verification system. The Finch Committee, under the influence of publishers (as well as a few specialities that needed more than free online access) recommended paying publishers extra for Gold instead of mandating cost-free Green. RCUK implemented the Finch Committee's recommendations, mandating Gold, and allowing Green only if Gold was unavailable. There was a storm of protest from scholars and scientists at this restriction on their freedom to choose where to publish based on journal quality standards alone. The Lords Select Committee pointed out some of these shortcomings. (A BIS Select Committee is still re-evaluating them.) RCUK has since clarified that authors may choose either Gold or Green, but it still has not adopted any compliance verification system for Green, but as instead allowed increasingly open-ended embargoes. (Reactions are still being evaluated.) HEFCE/REF has since proposed a Green mandate that would provide an effective compliance by requiring authors to self-archive in their institutional repositories immediately on publication -- regardless of whether the journal was subscription or Gold, and regardless of whether OA was immediate or embargoed -- in order to make their articles eligible for REF; institutions could then monitor and verify compliance. (Reactions are being evaluated.) No one has proposed putting an end to peer review (which is neither "expensive" nor "elaborate"), and the less urgent issue of further re-use rights for some is being given a lower priority than the urgent need of online access free for all. The EU and the US are likewise proceeding in the direction of Green OA mandates by institutions and funders.