Open Access Week – kudos to the Wellcome Trust

The Wellcome Trust has led the revolution towards making research articles both free (priceFree) and Open/libre (permissionFree). Here is Robert Kiley on Stevan Harnad’s blog (link):

At the Wellcome Trust we also believe that “fair use is not enough” if the benefits of text and data-mining – with its promise of discovering new knowledge – are to be fully realised. Consequently, as a condition of paying an open access fee, the Trust requires publishers to licence these articles such that they may be freely copied, distributed, displayed, performed and modified into derivative works by any user. Publishers may impose conditions on users in relation to attribution (i.e. users must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor) and commercial use (i.e. specify that the work must not be used for commercial purposes. All publishers which offer a “Wellcome compliant” OA option – which includes, Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, OUP etc – now include this licence information in the XML they deposit in PMC. Some publishers (e.g. Springer, OUP) use the CC-BY-NC, and others (e.g. Elsevier, T&F, Society for Endocrinology) have defined their own licences, but again they explicitly allow text-mining and the creation of derivative works. These articles are also made available through PMC’s OAI interface, and as such can be downloaded and exposed to text and data-mining services. Conscious that this licence only extends to “gold” OA articles, the Trust is continuing to work with publishers to explore the possibility of developing a similar licence for author manuscripts.
Regards Robert Kiley Head of e-Strategy Wellcome Library 183, Euston Road, London. NW1 2BE Tel: 020 7611 8338; Fax: 020 7611 8703; mailto:r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk Library Web site: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk

PMR: Again this is admirably clear. I would urge all mandaters to specifically use "text- and data-mining" in their language.

PMR. It’s a good opportunity to congratulate the Wellcome Trust on having made the position clear – no fudges. This is extremely useful when other funders are deciding what to do. Simple answer, look at what Wellcome have done.
[Addendum. I am now clearer why I was (and still am) confused about the Gold and Green lables: In critiquing(On Paying Publishers Extra For Extra Usage Rights) RobertK, Stevan Harnad writes:

The Wellcome Trust, the world’s first research funder to mandate OA, has not only mandated Green OA self-archiving, but has also made funds available to authors to pay their publishers to make their articles Gold OA, in order to make them not just price-barrier-free (Green OA) but also permissions-barrier-free.

PMR: I read this as meaning that Stevan makes a close association between “Green OA” and “price-barrier-free” and similarly between “permissions-barrier-free” and “Gold OA”. Peter Suber and Chris Rusbridge (on this blog – A better interpretation of “green” and “gold”) take the view that Green and Gold do not relate to barriers but to the mechanism of deposit of articles. There is clearly fuzziness about the terminology regardless of whether it is politically better to aim for particular strategies and that we should to remove it.
I believe that the terms self-archiving, price-free and permission-free are clear. I believe “Green” and “Gold” are confusing (not only in their usage but because there is a different but related scheme for classifying OA journals). There is no logical connection between Green OA and the precise nature of barriers, nor is there a logical connection between self-archiving and barriers.
Creative commons did us the service of providing orthogonal axes for licences (e.g. NC, SA, ND). I think we need these here. “self-archived, priceFree, permissionForbidden” is clear. “Green OA” is not.]