This is the last post I shall make – on this blog – on this subject.

Recent discussion has highlighted that this issue is much larger and much more critical than I thought even a few days ago. It is critical that we assemble clear dispassionate arguments to show overwhelming that CC-NC is totally incompatible with “Open Access” publishing and to persuade funders and publishers to move as rapidly as possible to a fully Open (Open Definition) licence. I am therefore taking this to the discussion group(s) of the Open Knowledge Foundation (http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss ) where it will have a wider audience and more informed comment.

Ross Mounce has put together a number of comments, the first of which states

“i.e. this mess has caused irreparable damage to the re-usability of the literature.”

I completely agree with this – and every month that it remains makes the future of Open Scholarly publishing worse. You can read all the comments but here are some which discuss the issue:

/pmr/2011/12/06/acceptance-of-cc-nc-has-sold-readers-and-authors-seriously-short/#comment-101293 (Richard Kidd, Royal Society of Chemistry)

/pmr/2011/12/06/acceptance-of-cc-nc-has-sold-readers-and-authors-seriously-short/#comment-101279 (Daniel Mietchen)

/pmr/2011/11/29/scientists-should-never-use-cc-nc-this-explains-why/#comment-101229 (Mike Linksvayer)

/pmr/2011/12/05/%E2%80%9Copen-access%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9Cnon-commercial%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-yet-again-can-any-publisher-justify-fees-for-hybrid-articles/#comment-101292 (Ross Mounce)

/pmr/2011/12/05/%E2%80%9Copen-access%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9Cnon-commercial%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-yet-again-can-any-publisher-justify-fees-for-hybrid-articles/#comment-101291 (Ross Mounce)

/pmr/2011/12/05/%E2%80%9Copen-access%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9Cnon-commercial%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-yet-again-can-any-publisher-justify-fees-for-hybrid-articles/#comment-101291 (Ross Mounce)

Anecdotal surveys in the comments by Daniel, Ross and PMR show that a very high proportion of well-known publishers are using CC-NC.

I was at the AGM of UK PubMedCentral last Monday and asked about the Open Access subset of PMC – those papers where authors/funders have paid large amounts of money to ensure their papers are “Open Access”. I asked about the licence, fully expecting these to be all CC-BY and was appalled to hear that most of them were only available as CC-NC. This appears to be near universal – mots major publishers only allow “Open Access” to be CC-NC.

Very simply, this is a disaster.

Because CC-NC gives the reader or re-user almost no additional rights. The author is paying anything up to 3000 currency units for something which is little more than permission to put the article on their web page. And as far as I can see the funders have acquiesced to this. Whether it was the best they could negotiate or whether it’s an oversight I don’t know – hopefully a funder will let us know.

I and others have written at length on the restrictions imposed by NC. NC forbids any commercial use. Commercial is not related to motivation – profit/non-profit, etc. It is whether there is an exchange of some form of goods. Among the things NC forbids are:

• Public text- and data-mining. A third party could make commercial use of the results
• Republication of diagrams, etc. in journals. Publication is a commercial act.
• Creation of learning materials. Students pay for their education.

And many more. You may think I am being picky and that no-one would object to this. But a licence is a legal document and these are commercial activities, regardless of the motivation.

So, simply, CC-NC forbids almost all downstream activity, rendering the “Open Access” valueless other than for human eyes.

Why do the publishers do this? After all BMC publishes all material as CC-BY and nothing terrible has happened to it. Why especially should a scholarly society which is meant to foster communication and science actually restrict its use. I won’t speculate, but leave it to them to reply. Note that making something CC-NC is not giving the reader permissions, it’s effectively removing permissions from Open Access CC-BY.

I find the whole cluster of “Open Foo” deeply worrying. These have names such as:

• Open Choice
• Author Choice
• Open Science (this is an appalling name – completely at odds with normal usage and conveying no information)
• Free content

When you see something described as “Open Choice” instead of Open Access it’s a very good indication that you will have to read the small print. Often there isn’t a licence. I can’t find licences on the RSC FAQs. “You may deposit the accepted version of the submitted article in other repository(ies) as required, with no embargo period, except that you are not permitted to deposit your work in any commercial service.” This isn’t a licence, it’s mumble. Springer (http://www.springer.com/open+access/authors+rights?SGWID=0-176704-12-467999-0 ): The copyright will remain with you and the article will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License. The cost of Springer Open Choice (USD 3.000/ EUR 2.000) is – as stated on the NIH web site – a permissible cost in your grant. CC-NC. Since Springer allow self-archiving (Green) the 2000 EUR is buying almost nothing (perhaps a slightly different form of the manuscript?). Nature (http://www.nature.com/srep/policies/index.html#license-agreement ) “Papers are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported or the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence, at the choice of the authors. ” and I could go on with other publishers.

One feature of these “Open Foo” products is that they are different for every publisher. Some bury the licence several pages down, others don’t mention it (RSC). It’s a huge amount of work to make sense of this. It shouldn’t have to be people like me.

The bottom line is that this is an unregulated market. Some of us are looking to the funders to act as regulators. They are not. They probably feel that 2000 for a CC-NC licence is what they want.

Unfortunately it’s not what I want and I have the feeling, yet again, that we have been sold short.

In summary:

• I’d like the RSC to justify NC because I can’t
• I’d like one of more funders to say why they have accepted such bad value in CC-NC licences.

Writing this blog is sometimes boring because I have to cover the same matter time and again. That’s unfortunately because progress – in Open knowledge – is so excruciatingly slow in the scholarly community that what I wrote five years ago still holds true. [By contrast the UK, European, and many other governments are making huge and rapid progress and if we, in academia and scholpub don’t take immediate notice we’ll be in trouble. Because this community/market has very little to be proud of.

A week ago I criticised the Royal Society of Chemistry (/pmr/2011/11/29/scientists-should-never-use-cc-nc-this-explains-why/) on the basis of their use of Non-Commercial licences and my intimation of their motives. I was taken to task for inaccuracies (/pmr/2011/11/29/scientists-should-never-use-cc-nc-this-explains-why/#comment-101071 ) (I hold my hand up and admit I got some details wrong); and for misinterpreting their motives. I may well have misrepresented them, but since I am not aware of major policy statements from RSC on Open Access, Licensing of Content, and their reaction to the Hargreaves report on intellectual property and copyright I have to make my own judgments.

Richard Kidd of the RSC has stated:

” [PMR has made] wholly incorrect inferences about our motivations, both in the specifics of the project and the wider motivations of the society”

And

“I’ll write more about my position on NC elsewhere – I fear its removal will make less data available to the public, rather than more – but just to note again for the devoted reader, its use was not for the reasons Peter ascribed in the blog post.”

[NOTE: I started writing about NC licences and what I believe to be shortchanging the authorSide. As the blog post progressed I find I was having to analyse the price of hybrid publishing. This is a separate issue (so I have two issues to explore with the RSC- both of which are compounded by their complete failure to tell us what and why they are doing.]

The point at issue is the general hybrid policy of the RSC and other STM publishers. Many funders require Open Access publication and almost all publishers have responded by creating an option where the author pays (a significant amount of) money and the resulting “article” is made “openly” available. I use quotes because neither has a precise universal meaning – it varies from publisher to publisher and you have to read the small print. Reading the small print is also error prone as the language is frequently imprecise and key aspects are omitted. I will advance my arguments and then allow the RSC or any other publisher unedited right to discuss on this blog.

One of the features of open Access is that the publishers contribute almost nothing to the public discussion. When publishers consistently fail to engage in discussion it is easy to assume that they don’t care about readers (and I think this is almost universally true of many publishers – they don’t care about readers – only about purchasers. [The presentational quality of today’s scholarly articles is appalling – Why are we still served with double-column fixed format portrait in an age of variable aspect-ratio devices?] It’s also true that most publishers don’t care about authors (other than as providers of free content). The hassle that most authors are put through is unnecessary. I bring this up because publishers, qua publishers, are largely divorced from their readership and authorship.

So I generally have to take what I see on public pages and deduce motivation from that. I will set out my argument and then invite the RSC, Springer (not BMC), Elsevier, ACS and anyone else operating paid hybrid publishing to comment. In the following post I will address CC-NC vs CC-BY. My content will be that the publisher is not only charging a large arbitrary sum which is close to pur profit, but that it is also seriously substandard as “Open Access”. The two issues are distinct but singly and together do the scholarly community a massive disservice.

Let’s first review “Open Access”. It is precisely defined by its founders in the Budapest Declaration (www.soros.org/openaccess ):

By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

This is crystal clear. It is made even clearer by being, clarified by SPARC mapped onto the Open Definition and onto a small, precisely defined, set of licences. In practice only CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, CC0 or PDDL need to be considered. If something is described as Open Access it is reasonable for someone to conclude that this is what they are paying for (author) or what their rights are (reader). I use “Open Access publisher” to mean a publisher whose publications are (almost) all labelled as CC-BY. PLoS is an OA publisher. Biomed Central is an Open Access publisher. Springer (which owns BiomedCentral) is not and is (in my opinion) deliberately fudging the issue. Various publishers have a very small number of “OA journals”. This does not justify us labelling them as OA publishers.

First let’s take an Open-Access publisher as the standard. BiomedCentral (commercial) or PLoSONE (non-profit). [New readers will note that OA does not equal non-profit or junk science.]

Definition of Open-Access: consistent with Budapest policy (“Free to use, re-use and redistribute for any purpose”).

Licence: CC-BY (dead simple to understand)

Purpose of author payment: To pay for a fair service (including profits) where all costs are recovered form author charges. (There may be other income but it’s generally minor)

Cost per article: about 1500 currency units (GBP, USD). Often slightly variable, may include tax, institution and other discounts.

Public discussion of Open Access: Massive (there is no requirement for an OA publisher to discuss OA, but most contribute considerably to the discussion.

Note that if I discover elsewhere there is an “Open Access publisher” and I know that the licence is CC-BY then I do not have to read any fine print, whether I am author or reader. Dead simple. These publishers will universally label their offering as “Open Access” (as it’s compatible with Budpaest).

[Note that there are Open Access publishers of dubious quality – see http://metadata.posterous.com/83235355. They muddy the waters. But there are also highly dubious commercial publishers. The issue here is only whether the OA publishers operate OA clearly and appropriately and for a reasonable charge. For example I have written to one about its use of CC-NC and they changed it.]

That’s it. All you have to know.

Now let’s look at “closed access” publishers and hybrid offerings. This is where the journal is closed, but some papers are made open on payment of a (significant fee). The incentive for this is almost entirely from the author or funder (frequently the author is required to do this by a funder, but sometimes the author simply believes in Open Access (such altruism is hard to believe, but still occurs). Judge from the RSC’s FAQ (http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/OpenScience/FAQ.asp ; I am afraid you will have to read this)

The RSC states:

Will RSC take author-pays revenues into account in setting future journal prices? Yes, but with the caveat that, along with many other publishers, RSC considers the author-pays open access model to be an experiment rather than a proven business model. Running this model alongside the normal subscription route for access represents a risk, and the RSC reserves the right to withdraw the author-pays open access model at any stage. 

This is hardly enthusiastic. To me it appears that the RSC is doing this grudgingly and hoping that it goes away. But I have only the public face of the RSC to go by. If you put “Royal Society of Chemistry Open Access” into a search engine you get TWO hits. One is the FAQ above, the other the RSC has asked me to stop criticizing. So I will. That makes the FAQ the only statement that the RSC has made. Can I be forgiving for not knowing what they are thinking?

Now hybrid journals are a mixture of conventional closed access and authorSidePays. Let’s assume that 10 percent of the papers are author pays. (This is about the average in UKPMC – it’s difficult to tell because publishers are usually not ultra helpful in making figures available.) So I have no idea what the actual percentage in RSC is. So I am going to ask the RSC some questions, which I hope they will answer.

• Q 1. What percentage of current papers (in 2010-2011) in RSC journals were “RSC Open Science” – we’ll come to this marketing term later?
• Q2. What were the gross revenues from authors for these papers?

Now let’s look at the costs and revenue. The wording of the RSC FAQ suggests that they have not reduced prices as a result of “Open Science”. Let’s also assume that they make net profits of 10 percent from the closed access articles. (Scholarly societies are always telling us that they have to make profits out of journals to subsidize the society). That profit covers income from subscriptions and the whole cost of creating the paper (author support, referee support, management, editorial, back office, marketing, detection of copyright theft, management of paywall, etc. Different publishers assert the cost ranges from 100 currency (GBP, USD, EUR) to 10000 currency. Let’s assume that the RSC is no more or less cost efficient than others who talk about this in public. Let’s assume it’s about 1500. (after all BMC and PLoS charge this sort of figure and the costs are transparent). I am sure the RSC would not wish to be seen as less efficient.

So now they get (say) 10 percent of their articles through AuthorSidePays. The cost of processing such a paper cannot be more than the closed access because you don’t have to pay the paywall police or the copyright lawyers. So let’s assume it’s also 1500. However the RSC charges 2000 so there is an immediate profit of 500 GBP per paper for which they don’t have to do anything different.

• Q3 what is the cost of processing a paper?
• Q4 what is the total profit made on closed access publications?
• Q5 what is the total profit made on Open Science publications?

Let’s also assume that the subscription hasn’t been lowered. Then the cost of processing is already contained in existing subscriptions. So the actual income is perhaps 1500 from the unchanged subscription revenue and 2000 from the authorSidePays charge, less 1500 for the processing charge.

So unless the subscription has actually been lowered, with a public explanation, the RSC cannot claim that they have taken it into account.

If you assume 10% then you can make these authorSidePays articles double the total profit per year.

Now I’m a chemist and have a thermodynamic view of money. If you get more income and do not increase your costs then you increase your profit.

Now, I think hybrid journals, while they last (and from its FAQ the RSC seems to want to kill them and offer NO Open Access) are a cash cow for any closed access publisher.

Now if the RSC answers these questions we can work out the figures. If they fail to answer then they fall into the category of utility companies or banks where the customer and the library starts to wonder if they are getting value for money.

So, RSC, please can we actually have a public discussion of these issues. If you remain silent then we can hardly be blamed for thinking that you sole motivation is getting as much income as possible from an unregulated monopoly.

I will address the “RSC Open Science” brand and the CC-NC in the next post.

Oh, and if any other closed access publishes want to convince the world that you are charging a fair price, please also try to answer these questions (ACS, Springer/nonBMC, Nature, Science, Wiley, Elsevier). I’ll give you a fair hearing.

I have now learnt how to make videos which can be used to illustrate aspects of what I and others are doing and trying to do. The raw material is video footage, voiceovers, captions, slides, hyperlinks, etc. I’m not a great fan of talking heads on videos (e.g. simply staring at the builtin webcam and talking for an hour. When I recently told by OKF colleagues I had a short video of 5 minutes they howled in protest : “short is 30 seconds”. Point taken.

Short is good. It’s hard to do it well because you have to work out what you want to say rather than waffling. I’ve been working with slides changing every 3-7 seconds. That’s hard work but feedback is good – people don’t seem to think it’s too fast. But it’s not easy to explain some things in less than minutes or hours and the semantic web is one of those. There is a level of complexity that cannot be avoided. It’s like musical scales. So we need lessons.

Yesterday I met Professor OWL (her name is capitalised and you will see why). We were walking back along Trumpington Street when Judith spotted a charity basket of toys in Little St Mary’s. Professor OWL is an RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_Owl and comes equipped with a real recording of a snowy owl in the Shetlands. Press her and she speaks. Here she is:

The animals have asked her to give a tutorial, and here she is with a diagram of the semantic web:

Professor OWL is a very important person in semantic, ontologies and all those things. She’s developed the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language (OWL)

“Surely it should be WOL, not OWL?”

No, Wikipedia says:

Acronym

Why not be inconsistent in at least one aspect of a language which is all about consistency?

—Guus Schreiber, Why OWL and not WOL?^[21]

The natural acronym for Web Ontology Language would be WOL instead of OWL. Although the character Owl from Winnie the Pooh wrote his name WOL, the acronym OWL was proposed without reference to that character, as an easily pronounced acronym that would yield good logos, suggest wisdom, and honor William A. Martin‘s One World Language knowledge representation project from the 1970s.

Professor OWL disputes this. Winnie-ther-Pooh is part of our culture. Rabbit says to WOL: “You and I have brains. The others have fluff.” Professor OWL certainly has brains.

So here ProfOWL is explaining triples (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6280676/swout1.mp4 – about 4 minutes). This time I have videoed myself writing and speaking at the same time. I quite like this medium – it’s far better than the cognitive dissonance of powerpoint. It’s not trivial – make one mistake in writing or speaking and you have to start again. (I made a mistake and there’s a minor glitch). You’ll see that I have skipped some of the repetitive bts – another device would be to run the writing at higher speed and then voice over.

I’ll leave her to explain the Sematic Web . I’d welcome feedback and we’ll get more on Tuesday night at the hackathon.

In the last week I have discovered that I can make movies on my PC. [This is not an advertisement for Microsoft products]. But there is a tool in Office called Windows Live Movie Maker which: is reasonably easy to learn (1 evening), is reasonably easy to use, has the features I need (audio, slides, video), produces reasonable “domestic” quality. Currently the one thing I can’t adjust is the dynamic rang of the sound which seems very flat. But hey, it’s free.

No it’s not, you have to pay for it!

Sorry, it came bundled with the stuff my University paid Microsoft for. Anyway I have been making movie clips inspired after Monday’s meeting of the UK PubMedCentral advisory board and the potential for using bibliography to enhance its (already considerable) value. The first movie (3.8 mins) tells WHY we need Open Bibliography and Open Content for biomedical literature. It’s an AnimalGarden production, and is narrated by a mixture of my voice and the animals. Here’s a still. The righthand actor is McDawg.

The movie is at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6280676/swat4ls2.mp4 (thanks to Nick Stenning for transcoding) or

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6280676/swat4ls2.wmv It’s a prequel to the semantic web:

[Why do all the penguins say “I’m SPARQL”? they’ve been watching classic movies]. If anyone has comments it’s relatively easy to edit. The 1-2 small glitches are because I had to omit confidential material – maybe I can fade them more gently.

So I am hoping to create some more material to show as lightning talks on Tuesday. And making movies is a great thing to do at hackathons – I really hope we have some at the end.

I am going to bore some readers by jabbering on relentlessly about why publishers should not use CC-NC. But every time you switch off it costs the academic community another few hundred million dollars. That will be cut from your research grants. Because CC-NC is simply handing money and goods and control and restriction and monopoly to the commercial publishers.

The current Gold Open Access model (the only one that works in science) is that papers are freely available on the web, for ever. And can be copied without permission, for whatever purpose. Including (yes you have seen this before):

• Re-using in textbooks
• Using as advertising by pharmaceutical firms
• Creating added value through text- and data-mining

The bargain of Gold OA is that the author/funder pays the publisher for the privilege. Most major funders are coming round to this. However how much do you have to pay? And whatdo you get for this?

The problem is that the authors have zero bargaining power. Let’s call the publisher the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation (SCC) so I don’t get sued. Of course it bears no resemblance to any earthly publisher. I submit a manuscript to SCC, it gets accepted, and then I say I want to publish it as CC-BY.

SCC: “We don’t do CC-BY”

PMR: “But I’ll pay for it”

SCC: “Ha!”

PMR: I have some funds from EPSRC to publish my work as Open Access (this is true)

SCC: “You can have CC-NC or stuff it”

PMR: “How much do you charge?”

SCC: “Well we told the UK House of Commons it costs about 15 000 GBP to publish a paper, so you can have it for 5000 GBP”

PMR: “That’s absurd. It doesn’t cost more than a few pounds to add a copyright notice and an OA notice. That’s extortion.”

SCC: “Well spotted. Publishers are about maximising profit. We don’t care about the scholarly community. Hand over the money.”

PMR (feebly): “I’ll publish it elsewhere.”

SCC: “Good luck. By the time you get it through their system (which is even more inefficient than ours) you will have been scooped”

PMR (inspired): “I’ll publish in PLoS ONE. They do CC-BY AND they’re massively cheaper”

SCC (bluffing): “Good luck. No one cares about PLoS ONE” (This is rubbish because SCC has spent energy dissing PLoS ONE and is starting its one pale imitation.)

The problem is that this is an artificial monopoly of the worst possible kind. The only thing that SCC is selling is brand – perceived worth. It’s roughly similar to the difference between mineral waters and tap water. But academia is hooked on perceived brands, and spends billions, yes billions, of taxpayer money in library subscriptions. If I were a taxpayer and not an academic I would be very angry. (hang on, you are a taxpayer – yes and I am very angry).

I am not an economist but I cannot think of any other area where government simply hands over unlimited money to a monopoly market sector. Gas, railways, health are all regulated. (what about bankers? Shut up – bankers violate the laws of thermodynamics – there is nothing we can do). So there are only two reasonable ways forward:

• Customers (yes, the universities) get together and reform the market. Yes, they could – but they are so hell-bent on competing against each other there is no chance.
• Regulation. Let’s write to our MPs and expose the scandal of wasted academic subscriptions. Ask them to regulate it. It’s their/our money. But that will never happen.

So we are doomed?

No – there’s a third force – the funders. They’ve got real teeth. Their goal is to see the research they fund actually read and used. Publishing in closed access journals is the most efficient means yet devised of destroying scientific information.

SCC: But all academics can read this in their libraries. We give them BIG DEALS which mean they can read more journals and pay a bit (PMR a lot) more for them.

FUNder: But we want everyone to read our funded work. That means full Open Access.

SCC: “Ha!”

FUN: “We will pay reasonable Author Processing Charges (APC)”

SCC: “15000 GBP per article”    

FUN: “Rubbish”.

SCC: “We’ll lobby in Congress. The glory of America is its ability to produce capitalist monopolies. We’ll lobby the Congressmen” [PMR: lobbying costs money. The money that libraries pay in subscriptions to publishers is used to protect the monopoly].

At this stage my mole’s recorder failed, so I have no record of the conversation. I know from second hand that the publishers have fought every inch of the way. The current state of (UK)PMC is the “market equilibrium” [sorry, political] between SCC and FUN. It’s messy and vastly suboptimal for science. There are very strict conditions put on the re-use of material from (UK)PMC. Much of it cannot be formally re-used. Much of it carries CC-NC – which effectively means there is little you can do with it other than read and print it. And, for this, FUN has had to pay (I’m guessing) >>1500 USD per paper.

Recap: This money is pure profit for the companies. They do not have to produce extra goods or services. They simply reliable the existing articles.

Scientists don’t care because they will continue to publish in SCC journals.

But not for long. Because the publishers are losing their monopoly. Unlike authors (who have no power) the funders do have power, Because their funding is vastly greater than the publishers’ incomes from subscriptions. They can mandate authors to publish OA-CC-BY.

And authors will ignore the mandate.

Oh hon. Not in the US. Mandates carry the real threat of not getting funds next time round. Even for Nobel Laureates. Europe has a bit further to go. But it will change.

But the real problem remains:

“How much should one pay for a CC-BY article?”

Clearly it’s way above cost at present. In theory the market should decide. But it can’t.

The solution may be coming with the Wellcome/HHMI/MaxPlanck journal. Here we have publishing run by the funders. There is no incentive to create monopoly pricing. So we’ll find out what the true cost is. And the cost will not include:

• Profits for shareholders
• Overpriced marketeers
• Professional denigrators and lobbyists
• Services for content restriction (DRM, web paywalls, etc.)

That’s a lot of cost that can be sliced off. Commercial publishers might start to get the occasional bad dream

But in the meantime we have the wholly unacceptable business of paying large amounts of money for the nearly useless CC-NC. Here’s an excellent article from PLoS highlighting the dangers, and the implied unethicality, of CC-NC. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001210 Abstract:

Scientific authors who pay to publish their articles in an open-access publication should be congratulated for doing so. They also should be aware that they may not be getting full open access from some publications that charge for publication under the “open access” label. Two features define an open-access publication: (1) the published contents are freely accessible through the Internet, and (2) readers are given copyright permission (see Box 1) to republish or reuse the content as they like so long as the author and publisher receive proper attribution [1]. Recently, some publications have begun offering an open-access option that charges for Internet publication without granting readers full reuse rights, such as Springer’s Open Choice or Nature’s Scientific Reports. These publishers have adopted a business model through which authors pay for immediate publication on the Internet but the publisher nonetheless keeps commercial reuse rights for itself. This is not full open access (see Box 2).

And a snippet:

I offer one example to illustrate the danger, but many others abound. Imagine an evolution in digital formats and a pseudo open-access publisher that has gone bankrupt. The journal’s content is on the web but its host site will soon be shut down. A new, for-profit venture sees value in republishing the defunct journal’s content in the new format. However, while the journal has died, its copyrights live on (for the life of the author plus another 70 years!). Because the journal demanded the commercial reuse rights even after collecting a hefty publishing fee from the author, the new venture would likely lack the legal right to copy and republish this piece of the scientific record in the new format to the detriment of those authors and the research community at large. We are living through a moment of fundamental opportunity. Let’s be clear. Only those publishers willing to fully seize this opportunity deserve to call their publications “open access.”

PMR: For me Open Access should only be used for CC-BY or CC0. The Budapest declaration mandated full re-use without permission. The messy thinking in the Open Access movement led to the term “Open Access” becoming operationally meaningless. So many funders are paying for a service which is far less value than they ought to get for their money. Any often it’s nearly valueless.

A really important post on the OKF open-Science mailing list – start at: http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/2011-December/001118.html Here Jenny Molloy posted:

I cam[e] across this story on Nature news (

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/12/could_crowd_sourcing_provide_t.html<http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/12/could_crowd_sourcing_provide_t.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+news%2Frss%2Fnewsblog+%28News+Blog+-+Blog+Posts%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

>

).

In an interesting combination of crowd sourcing and open data release,

openSNP encourages users of personal genome services (23andMe, deCode me

etc) to openly publish their results alongside phenotypic data that they

provide to the site. All data is available under a CC0 license, so is

completely compatible with the Open Knowledge Definition and the Panton

Principles. Is there anyone on the list who has been genotyped and would

like to comment on what they think of the idea?

And just now http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/2011-December/001121.html (Bastian Greshak) :

Hi,

I'm one of the founders of openSNP and up to now i've been a more or less quiet

 reader of this list. But I think I can give some more information about our

project. It is great to see that it gets discussed here.

I've read Misha Angrist's "Here is a human being", so I know about the PGP

and I'm also an avid reader of GU [genomes unzipped

(http://www.genomesunzipped.org/)]. And in a way both were a huge motivation

for our work on openSNP. The PGP is a huge and wonderful project and there

is no problem with their licensing schemes. But the "problem" is that they

don't offer a way to participate for everyone (and up to now they have no

way to filter and easily download the data, a thing that is needed to make the data usable).

Similarly GU does not offer a way to participate for everyone, while those

don't offer phenotypic information which is needed for association studies.

So basically openSNP was born out of the idea that I also wanted to be able

 to share my genetic/phenotypic information in order to be able to make it

usable for other scientists.

We think that open science should not only mean that the data itself is shared

 under open licenses. But that it should also be possible for everybody to

actively participate in the science. So I think this is a difference between

the PGP, GU and openSNP. Besides this: We are in contact with John Wilbanks

of weconsent and GU, because we also think that it would be a good thing to

 use synergetic effects.

For me this is the most important point of Open Science – it belongs to everyone, in the same way that Wikipedia and open Street map belong to everyone. Open Science is more than Open Access, Open Data, Open Standards, Open Notebook Science. It's about the idea that science belongs to all of us.

After all it's all of us who fund science. When we fund public life - the arts, hospitals, schools; there isn't an elite (or there certainly shouldn't be). But science, partly because it's difficult, partly because it's "only done in universities", partly because access to the its output (the literature) is crippled, is remote.

That's changing. Yes, there will always be parts of science that are beyond normal people. *I* have no more access to the Large Hadron Collider than anyone else – I don't understand its purpose, I can't design an experiment, I can't interpret the results. I am rightly not allowed to run clinical trials. But I *can* understand the results. And so can a lot of other people who aren't in universities.

There are many myths about Open Science. I'll debunk some:

• Ordinary people (including patients) can't understand the literature. This myth has been promoted as an argument against Open Access. If you think it's true I suggest you come to the hackathon and challenge Gilles Frydman or Graham Steel as to whether they and their patient communities can understand the literature. But I would bring protective clothing.
  

• Open Science means loss of confidentiality. "If all data are recorded on the web then confidentiality is impossible". This is just as puerile. Of course Open Science and Open Data are designed so that patient data, social data, rare species, etc. are kept confidential.
  

• Ordinary people can't do proper science. The success of GalaxyZoo (galactic objects), Foldit (predicting protein structure), etc. shows that "ordinary" people can make discoveries that are publishable in mainstream scientific literature. It won't happen in all subjects – some require special licences, safety, etc. Others cost a great deal and the days of the enlightenment aristocracy have gone. We don't advocate being Frankensteins. But BioCurious shows that a great deal of modern biology is accessible at low cost and adequate safety. When scientific components become commoditised they become increasingly accessible.
  

• Ordinary people can't be trusted to make decisions. I don't need to answer this, do I? Ordinary people make decisions everywhere else. Ordinary people fund science (government, charities, etc.). Science belongs to them, not just academia. And we need the enlightenment that ordinary people bring.
  

The JISC/SWAT4LS/OKF Hackathon starts on Tuesday in London. http://www.swat4ls.org/workshops/london2011/ and see Jenny Molloy’s blog post: http://science.okfn.org/2011/11/09/open-research-reports-trailer/

Here are some of the stars:

On the left is KosherFrog (alias @gfry, Alias Gilles Frydman). (We’ll create some better glasses for him). Here’s his twitter avatar:

In the middle is a patient – or rather the mother of a patient. She is carrying Roo’s salbutamol inhaler. She needs access to medical information.

And on the right is McDawg. He’s Graham Steel. Here’s HIS twitter avatar.

We’ll be creating semantic resources for disease.

Be there.

I have been alerted to a discussion in the letter pages of J. Chem. Inf. Modeling (an ACS Journal). I normally read the literature through a paywall window (my home machine has no privileges and so I get a “citizen-enhanced” view of the primary literature. The enhancement is of course massively negative – I can’t read most of this. For most things if I can’t read them they don’t exist – an increasingly common approach. Occasionally I switch on access to the University VPN which allows me to read the fulltext – thereby requiring the University to continue its subscription (in dollars) to this journal. Unless they use the paywall filter academics in rich universities (which is the only real market for scholarly journals) have no idea how impoverished the world is. But many of my readers will appreciate – they are the Scholarly Poor. And what follows can be understood by anyone – you don’t have to be a chemist. Note that many research institutions do not subscribe to JCIM so I expect most readers will have a “scholarly poor lens” on what follows.

• Earlier this year a paper was published http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ci100223t

  Data-Driven High-Throughput Prediction of the 3-D Structure of Small Molecules: Review and Progress
  

  Alessio Andronico†, Arlo Randall†, Ryan W. Benz†, and Pierre Baldi*†‡

  ^†School of Information and Computer Sciences, Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics and ^‡Department of Biological Chemistry, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California 92697-3435, United States

  J. Chem. Inf. Model., 2011, 51 (4), pp 760–776 DOI: 10.1021/ci100223t Publication Date (Web): March 18, 2011 Copyright © 2011 American Chemical Society

I can’t reproduce the abstract because although it was written by the authors they have signed over its ownership/copyright to ACS. (ACS in their generosity allow you to read this at the end of the link above). Note that the system is mounted at http://cosmos.igb.uci.edu/ . It contains the rubric:

Note: In as much as this Service uses data from the CSD [Cambridge Structural Database] , it has been given express permission from the CCDC [Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre] . At the request of the CCDC, no more than 100 molecules can be uploaded to the Service at a time, and the Service ought to be used for scientific purposes only, and not for commercial benefit or gain.

Well – that was a pretty challenging paper, wasn’t it? (Sorry scholarly poor, I can’t tell you what it said – but trust me – or pay 35 USD).

This elicited a response from the director of the (CCDC). If you read the abstract you will see their involvement. (BTW I have no relation to them except geographical proximity and the University has declared that they don’t belong to the University (for FOI) although they are listed as a department). Here is his 1-page response:

• http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1021/ci2002523 Data-Driven High-Throughput Prediction of the 3-D Structure of Small Molecules: Review and Progress. A Response from The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre,

  Colin R Groom* The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, 12 Union Road, Cambridge CB2 1EZ, U.K.

He clearly disagrees with their contention. (Scholarly Poor you will have to fork out another 35 USD to read this single page). [2]

And the original authors responded

• (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ci200460z ) Data-Driven High-Throughput Prediction of the 3-D Structure of Small Molecules: Review and Progress. A Response to the Letter by the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Center

  Pierre Baldi

  J. Chem. Inf. Model., Just Accepted Manuscript • DOI: 10.1021/ci200460z • Publication Date (Web): 22 Nov 2011

Wow! Some strong disagreement on matters of fact. (Stop whining Scholarly Poor and pay another 35 USD to read this letter – it’s nearly 2 pages!). I’ll reveal that it contains phrases like “simply false”. And you can read the abstract which contains the phrase “significant impediments to scientific research posed by the CCDC.”

So that is a pretty damning indictment. Of the CCDC? Maybe, if you can read the letters. But certainly of the ACS. An important discussion about the freedom of re-use of the scholarly literature is hidden behind a paywall. The letters have been written by scientists and presumably reproduced verbatim by the ACS. What possible justification is there for requiring the charge of 35 USD? There is no peer review involved. But then the ACS charges 35 USD for everything, including an 8-WORD retraction notice. (It’s sort of easier just to charge vast amounts of money than think what you are doing to science).

So I am in a dilemma. How to I bring this discussion to public view. Because that is what a Scholarly Society SHOULD wish. I can’t expect everyone to pay 105 USD. (The part of the first paper that is involved is only two sentences). I have the following options:

• Do nothing – this will perpetuate the injustices
• Write summaries of the letters (absurd because it will distort the meaning)
• Extract paragraphs and publish them under fair use. (There is no doctrine of fair use in the UK and I could be sued for any phrase extracted – I have already laid myself open to this with the phrase “simply false”
• Urge the authors of the letters to publish them Openly. In doing so they will break the conditions of publication and lay themselves open to legal action or having subscriptions to JCIM cut off
• Write to the editor of the Journal suggesting it would be in the public interest to publish the letters? In general editors don’t reply – but I know this one. But in any caseI dounbt they would do it and it makes the situation worse
• Or follow a reader’s suggestion I haven’t thought of

Because I am now going to continue to challenge the CCDC. I have been turned down on FOI ground with a technicality (that the CCDC although listed as a department of the University isn’t part of it for FOI). BTW it took the University FOI 19.8 days to work that out.

If you read the last paper (shut up and pay!) you will see that the authors quote our work on Crystaleye and suggest that it, together with the Crystallography Open Data Base (COD) could and now should replace the CCDC. They say (I have removed all the letter “O”s [1] to avoid direct quoting) 35 USD will tell you where the O’s are meant to be.

As histry shws, thse wh stand in the way f demcracy and scientific prgress end up lsing ver the lng-run. The reactinary attitude f the CCDC staff has started t backfire by energizing academic labratries arund the wrld t find alternative slutins arund the CCDC.

I agree with the sentiments expressed. The only problem is that the authors chose to do it behind a paywall.

I shall continue my campaign to liberate “our” data from the CCDC+Wiley/Elsevier/Springer monopoly. Sancho Panza (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sancho_Panza ) is welcome to join me.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_O James Thurber.

[2] UPDATE: I managed to get it for free but maybe I have a cached copy?

UPDATE: It now seems that most people can get the first letter (“Editorial”) for free but I still have to pay for the UCI response

There is a really important article at http://www.pensoft.net/journals/zookeys/article/2189/creative-commons-licenses-and-the-non-commercial-condition-implications-for-the-re-use-of-biodiversity-information. (Hagedorn G et al)

[NOTE the OKF has a clear indication of the problems of CC-NC. They should add a link to Hagedorn. See my earlier blog post /pmr/2010/12/17/why-i-and-you-should-avoid-nc-licences/ ].

So, you aren’t interested in Biodiversity Journals? Never read Zookeys? (I didn’t know it existed). But in 1 day about 1200 people have accessed this article. Yet another proof that WHAT you publishe matters, not WHERE. And hopefully this blog will send a few more that way.

I can’t summarise all of it. The authors give a very detailed and, I assume, competent analysis of Copyright applied to scientific content (data, articles, software) and its licensability under Creative Commons. Note that “This work is published Under a Creative Commons Licence” – which so many people glibly use is almost useless. It really means “This work is copyrighted [unless it’s CC0] and to find out whether you have any rights you will have to look at the licence”. So please, always, specific WHAT CC licence you use.

The one you choose matters, because it applies the rule of LAW to your documents. If someone does something with them that is incompatible with the licence they have broken copyright law. For example combining a CC-NC-SA licence with CC-BY-SA licence is impossible without breaking the law.

There are so many misconceptions about NC. Many people think it’s about showing that you want people to share your motivation. Motivation is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether the court assessing the use by the licensor breaks the formal non-commercial licence. There’s little case law, but the Hagedorn paper argues that being a non-profit doesn’t mean non-commercial. Recovering costs can be seen as commercial. And so on.

We came across this when we wished to distribute a corpus of 42 papers using in training OSCAR3. The corpus was made available by the Royal Society of Chemistry. It was used (with contributions from elsewhere) to tune the performance of OSCAR3 to chemistry journals. Because training with a corpus is a key part of computational linguistics we wished to distribute the corpus (it’s probably less than 0.1% of the RSC’s published material – it would hardly affect their sales). After several years they agreed, on the basis that the corpus would be licenced as CC-NC. I pointed out very clearly that CC-NC would mean we couldn’t redistribute the corpus as a training resource (and that this was essential since others would wish to recalibrate OSCAR). Yes, they understood the implications. No they wouldn’t change. They realised the problems it would cause downstream. So we cannot redistribute the corpus with OSCAR3. The science of textmining suffers again.

Why? If I understood correctly (and they can correct me if I have got it wrong) it was to prevent their competitors using the corpus. (The competitors includes other learned societies. )

I thought that learned societies existed to promote their discipline. To work to increase quality. To help generate communal resources for the better understanding and practice of the science. And chemistry really badly needs communal resources – it’s fifteen years behind bioscience because of its restrictive practices. But I’m wrong. Competition against other learned societies is more important than promoting the quality of science.

Meanwhile Creative Commons is rethinking NC. They realise that it causes major problems. There are several plans (see Hagedorn paper):

Creative Commons is aware of the problems with NC licenses. Within the context of the upcoming version 4.0 of Creative Commons licenses (Peters 2011), it considers various options of reform (Linksvayer 2011b; Dobusch 2011):

• hiding the NC option from the license chooser in the future, thus formally retiring the NC condition

• dropping the BY-NC-SA and BY-NC-ND variant, leaving BY-NC the only non-commercial option

• rebranding NC licenses as something other than CC; perhaps moving to a “non-creativecommons.org” domain as a bold statement

• clarifying the definition of NC

I’d support some of these (in combination) but not the last. Because while it is still available many people will use it on the basis that it’s the honourable thing to do (I made this mistake on this blog). And others will use it deliberately to stop the full dissemination of content.