Bill Hooker has supported my suggestion of labels (We must have licences for publications) for describing the re-usability of publications. I will use “labels” rather than “licences” at present as it allows us to describe practice rather than mandate it
I have an absolute need to know precisely what the status of a paper is – effectively can my robots download it without the publisher cutting off all supply to journals to the University of Cambridge. This has happened twice already even though we did nothing wrong and I don’t particularly want it to happen again. So it would be valuable to know what type of information I was likely to find on publishers’s (and institutional – I don’t want to be banned from University repositories either) sites. So I suggested a licencing system and I’m happy to start with the idea of labels (Bill and I and other Blue Obelisk members are starting to do this although it’s mote complicated than it looks).
Most OA licences are permissive – you are allowed to do X. Most non-OA licences are primarily restrictive – you (author) are not allowed to do X, you (reader) are not allowed to do X, Y, Z. So I am not sure yet what the CA (closed access) labels will look like till we have surveyed a few. We’ll probably start with “CA”, meaning “assume you can’t do anything” and extend it to “CA-PW” (can post on personal web site but may not advertise where this is) and CA-ER (limited number of electronic reprints – a gorgeously fatuous idea – you give a publisher URL to your friends and they can read (but not redistribute) a copy of the paper there. Every read decrements a counter.) I am sure there are other splendid licences out there – we should run a little competition for the most restrictive licence.
The simple point is that any publisher with a restrictive licence is actively crippling cyberscience. We are paying commercial organisations to stop us doing the next generation of science. It’s even more fatuous than the European Common Agricultural Policy where farmers are…
… I need to do some real work – coding – to relax from this.
I shall adopt the same naming method, making licenses explicit when talking about specific journals, publishers or whatever. I think this will go a long way towards alleviating confusion/term dilution, and also towards fixing in the consumers’ (researchers’) minds that OA must come with a licence in order to be useful.
I suggest one other way forward: pay careful attention to mandates as they are established. If they are worded clearly, much publisher weaseling can be pre-empted; if the publishing lobby and their pet pit-bulls get their way, the mandates we end up with will be full of loopholes.