Tag: green open access

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Call to Action: Oppose Section 302 of the Proposed FIRST Act

This just in from SPARC:

A discussion draft of the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology Act of 2013 (FIRST), currently being circulated within the House Science Committee, would impose significant barriers to the public’s ability to access taxpayer funded research by restricting federal science agencies’ ability to provide timely, equitable, online access to articles and data reporting on the results of research that they support.

One provision of the proposed bill – Section 302 – would extend the embargo period after which federally funded research must be made freely available to up to three years after publication.  This extension would undercut federal agencies’ ability to effectively implement the widely-supported White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Directive on Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research, undermine the public access program pioneered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and significantly hurt the utility of US public access policy.

You can learn more about Section 302 of the proposed FIRST Act and how it would delay public access to publicly funded research on the SPARC website.

SPARC asks supporters of Open Access to take the following steps to ensure Section 302 doesn’t roll back the White House Directive:

  1. Ask your representatives in Congress to oppose language in the proposed FIRST Act to delay public access (Section 302) now through our Legislative Action Center. [I did it! Now you!]
  2. Tweet at your legislators to oppose Section 302 of the FIRST Act and directly at Representative Lamar Smith (@LamarSmithTX21), Chairman of the House Science Committee. [I did it! Now you!]
  3. Forward this call to action or a link to the SPARC action page for the FIRST Act to friends, colleagues, and email lists.  Post about the bill to personal or organizational social media channels.
  4. Write an op-ed or letter to the editor about Section 302 of the FIRST Act for your local or campus newspaper, blog, or other publication outlet.

It’s a busy day, so I hope that copying and pasting their email counts as blogging about the issue.  I wholeheartedly agree that Section 302 of the FIRST Act would be disastrous for science, industry, academia, and the overall world of ideas, even if I don’t have time just now to state that opposition in my own carefully constructed language…

Image from Rochester Institute of Technology's Wallace Center
Image from Rochester Institute of Technology’s Wallace Center
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I’m Having Open Access Policy Envy

University_of_California_Seal.svgSummer tends to be slow at universities, but not this summer at the University of California! UC’s academic senate just passed an open access policy that covers over 8,000 faculty at the 10 UC campuses and could make as many as 40,000 publications per year open access in eScholarship, UC’s institutional repository.

Like many other “green” open access policies (that is, policies that say nothing about where faculty should publish but require that copies of journal articles be made open access in a repository), the UC policy says that faculty automatically grant a non-exclusive license to their articles before entering any contractual arrangements with journal publishers.

The “before” is key: it means that journal publishers can’t take the copyright away from the authors, since the university will already have a license.  (And step back for a second: how crazy is it that publishers have ever been able to take full copyright away from authors?!)

And, like other green open access policies, the UC policy allows faculty to request a waiver for any article they would like not to fall under the policy.  These waivers are also key: they ensure that faculty whose works (or beliefs) are not compatible with the policy for some reason or another do not have to relinquish any control or choice.

As many around CUNY know, I (and many others) very much want CUNY to adopt a similar policy.  We’ve been agitating for a university-wide institutional repository, but a repository is only so useful in the absence of a strong policy.  Harvard has created a guide to good practices for university open access policies and has released a model policy, carefully worded and helpfully annotated.

Let’s daydream for a minute, shall we? Imagine a CUNY version of the Harvard policy:

Begin daydream:

The Faculty of the City University of New York (CUNY) is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to CUNY permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More specifically, each Faculty member grants to CUNY a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy applies to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost’s designate will waive application of the license for a particular article or delay access for a specified period of time upon express direction by a Faculty member.

End daydream.

Ah, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?  That combined with a CUNY repository would lead to thousands upon thousands of open access articles every year.  For the benefit of our students and all students.  For the benefit of our faculty and all faculty.  For the benefit of the taxpayers who fund CUNY and all people everywhere.  (And remember, these are articles that faculty were never going to earn any money for anyway, so no faculty would lose income!)

 

 

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Springer Also Losing Some OA Sparkle

Springer_icon_512X512We looked last week at how Emerald (perhaps inspired by the problematic new RCUK open access policy) changed its self-archiving policies, becoming a less sparkling green OA publisher. Alas, Springer also recently changed its self-archiving for the worse (from the perspective of authors and readers), dulling its OA sparkle as a result.

Springer’s new policy says that authors may make the post-refereed versions of their articles available immediately on their personal websites but must wait a year before making them available in repositories. This embargo is nothing new with respect to subject repositories — Springer’s previous policy required a year-long embargo for subject repositories. But it is new for institutional repositories — Springer used to allow articles to appear immediately there. This change to a year-long embargo for institutional repositories makes self-archiving harder and more confusing and thus less likely to be attempted. So that’s bad. And in addition to being a bad change, it’s arguably a nonsensical change.

Consider institutional repositories on the Digital Commons platform. There’s a Digital Commons add-on called SelectedWorks that creates personal homepages for repository contributors. Are they personal webpages? Yes. Are they part of an institutional repository? Yes. So there goes that distinction.

Even for institutional repositories on other platforms, the distinction isn’t so clear. OK, sure, the institutional repository and personal homepages are probably on different servers. But the institutional repository is in some ways just an extension of those homepages, a place that the homepages link to. The School of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Southampton wisely chose to be explicit about the continuousness of these spaces in its open access policy:

3v. Copyright agreements may state that eprints can be archived on your personal homepage. As far as publishers are concerned, the EPrint Archive is a part of the Department’s infrastructure for your personal homepage.

In short, just like Emerald, Springer wants us to believe that two things are mutually exclusive and incompatible, even though they aren’t. Emerald wants us to believe that voluntary and mandated self-archiving are mutually exclusive, which is obviously untrue. (After all, it’s people who support and practice self-archiving who passed all the mandatory self-archiving policies at universities around the world!) And Springer wants us to believe that personal websites and institutional repositories are mutually exclusive. That might initially sound like a reasonable distinction, but it’s confused. And, of course, confusing.

Curious? Angry? Read more here and here.