Category Archives: Issues

Open Access FAQ

by Pamela Samuelson and Molly Van Houweling, Authors Alliance Co-Founders.
Last updated Oct. 20, 2014.

What is “open access”?
Who is adopting open access?
Is this just for academics?
What are the barriers to open access for authors who want to adopt it?
How do university-wide open access policies work?
What do the terms “Green OA” and “Gold OA” mean?
What is the relationship between Open Access and Authors Alliance? Is Authors Alliance only for authors who make all of their work available on open access terms? What about authors who need to sell copies of their books?
Are there any advantages of assigning copyrights to publishers or other intermediaries?
Where can I learn more?

What is “open access”?

Many authors are choosing to make their works available free of charge and with few, if any, restrictions on reuse. The term “open access” is commonly used to describe this practice and the movement that promotes it. Open access contrasts with more traditional models of “restricted access” publishing in which copies of works are only made available to paying customers and, in the case of libraries, their patrons.

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Who is adopting open access?

Choosing open access is most common among those who want to use the power of the internet to share their findings and scholarship with as broad a readership as possible. These authors want to reach people all over the world, including those who might not have access to libraries that subscribe to expensive scholarly journals. Some researchers accomplish this by posting their scholarly works on their own websites or in institutional repositories and indicating that anyone may copy and redistribute those works. This practice is consistent with the requirements of a growing number of funding agencies that demand that the research they fund be made accessible to the public. (See, for example, the NIH Public Access Policy and California’s newly-enacted Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act.)

Open access is especially attractive to authors who are paid salaries or receive grant funding to produce research and scholarship. Such authors are less likely to rely on revenue from the sales of copies of their works to fund their research and writing. In fact, in the scholarly journal publishing context, authors do not typically receive royalties or other payments based on the sale of copies of their articles. What they receive instead are the rewards associated with impacting both fellow scholars and the public at large—rewards that can be enhanced by open access.

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Is this just for academics?

While the term “open access” is generally used in reference to scholarship, salaried researchers are far from the only authors attracted to the open access model. For example, the standardized open access licenses promulgated by Creative Commons (“CC”) have been adopted by writers, graphic artists, photographers, musicians, filmmakers, and all types of creators who want to see their works widely accessed, shared, and even adapted into new works. They choose from among a menu of licenses depending on whether they want to allow commercial or only non-commercial use, whether they want to allow adaptations or only verbatim copies, and whether they want to require any adaptations to be licensed under the same terms. All of the standard CC licenses require proper attribution, although CC also offers a separate legal tool called “CC0” for those who want to waive copyright altogether and opt into “no rights reserved.”

A number of other open access licensing models are available, especially for computer programs. The GNU General Purpose License (“GPL”) is one of the best known of these. GPL software can be reproduced, distributed, and adapted, so long as adapters release their source code and license it on GPL terms.

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What are the barriers to open access for authors who want to adopt it?

Author-initiated open access—even via self-archiving on an author’s own website—is inconsistent with the once-prevalent practice of assigning copyrights to publishers or granting publishers exclusive copyright licenses. Under the terms of such agreements, publishers can (and sometimes do) object when authors distribute their own works on open access terms. Authors committed to open access need to retain the rights to distribute their own work and authorize others to reuse it.

This is more challenging for some authors than for others. Scholars who write about contemporary art, for example, must often clear rights to reproduce images in articles commenting on these copyrighted creations (although some use is permitted under copyright’s fair use doctrine). It may be more difficult to negotiate permission to include images in open access works than in a limited print run of paper journals.

For other authors, the prestige of publishing an article in a leading peer-reviewed journal whose publisher insists on assignments of copyright may be a strong incentive to choose not to make works available on an open access basis. This is especially of concern to junior faculty whose tenure applications may depend on a publication record in top peer-reviewed proprietary journals, and to scholars in fields without established open access outlets.

These obstacles should fall, however, as open access journals establish their own reputations and proliferate across disciplines, as existing journals adopt more open practices, and as senior scholars signal the value of maximizing scholarly dissemination. Options are also increasing for authors who want to apply open access principles to books as well as articles. (See, for example, the new initiative at UC Press.) The Authors Alliance hopes to contribute to ongoing efforts to establish new models of dissemination that work for every author who wants to use open access to be more widely read.

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How do university-wide open access policies work?

When faculty members assign their copyrights to publishers, their universities (which often paid for the costs of developing the materials in the first place) end up having to pay high prices to purchase back the works of their own faculty. And faculty members who have assigned copyrights cannot make their own scholarship publicly available or authorize others to reuse it.

To overcome these problems and improve the flow of scholarly communication, many university faculties have expressed their collective commitments to open access. They have adopted policies under which faculty members agree to deposit their articles into institutional repositories and to grant the permission necessary for those repositories to make the articles available for public access and reuse.

When faculty authors at these institutions insist on instead granting exclusive rights to publishers, they must seek waivers of their open access policies. Although most such policies grant waivers liberally, they nonetheless change the default practice away from exclusive publisher rights under restrictive terms and toward open access. Evidence so far suggests that waiver requests are rare and that many scholarly journal publishing agreements now reserve to authors the rights necessary to make at least the author’s final version (before the publishers’ edits and formatting) available on open access terms.

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What do the terms “Green OA” and “Gold OA” mean?

Both authors and publishers can implement open access. When authors make their own work available—whether on their personal websites, their institutional repositories, or on third-party repositories like arXiv.org—the practice is commonly called “Green Open Access.”

Increasingly, publishers themselves are adopting open access models. When a publisher is the party making open access works available to the public, the practice is called “Gold Open Access.”

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What is the relationship between Open Access and Authors Alliance? Is Authors Alliance only for authors who make all of their work available on open access terms? What about authors who need to sell copies of their books?

Helping authors make their works available on open access terms is consistent with the mission of Authors Alliance: assisting and representing authors who want to disseminate knowledge and products of the imagination broadly. But open access is not the only way for authors to promote the broad dissemination of their works, and Authors Alliance will help authors pursuing a wide range of approaches.

For example, many authors assign their copyrights to commercial publishers in order to earn advances and royalties, but years later are earning nothing because their books are out of print. Authors Alliance is developing educational resources and tools that will help such authors reclaim their rights (by exercising options in their original contracts or renegotiating with their publishers). Some authors may want to reclaim copyrights in order to put the works in the public domain or make them available through open access licensing. Other authors will want to reclaim rights in order to self-publish or make new arrangements with publishers so their out-of-print works avoid digital oblivion. Bringing a book back into print or making it newly available in digital form makes it more accessible than before and therefore contributes to our mission. And our advice on rights reversions will be useful to both those who choose open access and those who opt for more proprietary alternatives.

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Are there any advantages of assigning copyrights to publishers or other intermediaries?

Authors who rely for their livelihoods on advances and royalties from publishers who sell copies of their books or articles often assign copyrights (or grant exclusive licenses) to those publishers in order to secure both publication and compensation. In addition to needing compensation in order to make their livings, these authors may prefer to have their publishers deal with copyright registration, detecting infringement and sending cease and desist letters, and other copyright details about which the publisher is likely to have more expertise than the individual author (although many authors in this situation have agents to help them navigate the process).

Note, however, that these preferences may be time-limited, relevant only for the commercial life of an author’s books and articles. Most works stop earning money long before their copyrights expire. At this point publishers may lose interest while authors will want to find ways to ensure that their intellectual legacies live on. Authors Alliance will be developing resources to help all authors better understand the consequences of copyright assignments and how they might be adjusted them over time.

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Where can I learn more?

Researchers committed to open access have developed refined definitions of it and articulated policies supporting it, including the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, and the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

These definitions are broad enough to encompass a range of different specific practices for sharing works of authorship and granting permission to reuse them. It can therefore be useful to think about open access along a continuum, asking “how open is it?” using this guide produced by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and Public Library of Science.

Other excellent sources of information about Open Access include:

The MIT Libraries’ Open Access FAQ
Peter Suber’s Overview of Open Access
The Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI)
Open Access Week, an annual event to promote open access
The University of California Office of Scholarly Communication’s Open Access page
The Georgia State University Library’s Open Access page

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UC Press Pioneers the Scholarly Monograph’s Open Access Future

Posted September 8, 2014

By Authors Alliance co-founder Tom Leonard, University Librarian at the University of California, Berkeley.

Image derived from one by Mike Fernwood, used under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

Last Spring the view out the windows of the University of California Press was a glass-skinned energy lab dedicated to saving the planet. This fall, the Press’s move from Berkeley to Oakland completed, editors look out on a glass-skinned cathedral that is dedicated to saving souls. The Press now wants to use both technology and exaltation to save the book.

Not all books, but simply the good ones that scholars write to be read. These need saving. Today, most original scholarship, well written and edited, can expect book sales of only several hundred copies. A few score research libraries buy these books; they are not easily found by anyone. Their authors would like to see their contributions to knowledge discovered, explored, and discussed, but all too often traditional publication models don’t serve these ends.

Indeed, if they are not available as e-books that easily pop into view, they join the ranks of the great unread. We used to use that term for volumes that had slept quietly in the stacks for decades because they were off the reading lists of the academy. Shorter press runs and high prices needed to cover fixed costs commit more books to this fate than ever before.

Most university presses face this challenge. National organizations such as the Association of American Universities and the Association of Research Libraries have sketched ways to save the long arguments that are uniquely supported by books. Mellon and other foundations have worked with the Association of American University Presses to find solutions. As a veteran of many big think meetings on this problem, I have found the good will a sign of the health of higher education. But what we have not had until now is a first mover with a sustainable business plan. UC Press is now taking the lead (a judgment that I do not believe is biased by my service on their Board).

Alison Mudditt and her deputy director Rebekah Darksmith have stepped over the morass of platforms and ways to “capture reader eyeballs” for press output that has slowed other publishers. UC Press will find high-tech partners to produce e-books. The Press, however, will control the selection and editing, maintaining its stringent standards and removing any impression that the author’s vanity is the true driver. Books will be “free at launch” as an e-book. The open access (OA) book will display on the platform of the reader’s choosing. These titles will be marketed, supported for awards submission, and available in a print on demand (paper) copy at an attractive price.

UC Press figures that books it publishes in traditional editions cost $34,000 to produce, warehousing and distributing paper being a significant part. This will continue to be the path for many Press titles. The new OA approach for perhaps 15 titles in 2015, looks to be a $14,000 investment per title. That sum can be captured from the subsidies that are now going to produce these volumes with a paper edition only, the costs that Libraries would willingly contribute because they are now pointing readers to resources that are free and not always making purchases, and from the revenues that will flow from print on demand revenue. As is the case today, the author too will be tapped and so her dean or department will be asked to support the publication. UC Press will be building a fund to help authors, particularly important for independent scholars.

This will take some getting used to. But long arguments in the social sciences and humanities do not have bright futures if left to the business logic of scholarly book publishing. These books will not make the leap to an e-book reading culture. Today, after much hard work, most university presses gain no more than an eighth of their revenue from selling e-books. The market is not really telling them to find an alternative to high-priced traditional volumes with very low press runs; even though this approach disfavors the accessibility scholarly authors need in order to be read. There may have been gains in watchful waiting, but surely we have now banked all of these dividends. Today academic publishers need a first mover, as much to help these disciplines as to help themselves. A print-first/only model will, the Press has concluded, risk leaving these fields “out of the vibrant world of digital scholarship and debate.” Indeed, exaltation about scholarship is as important as the bottom line.

Authors Alliance Members Lead Push toward Open and Accessible Legal Education

Posted September 2, 2014

Textbooks are essential instructional tools but they’re not without problems. Most familiar to students is the problem of cost: textbook prices have been significantly outstripping inflation for some time, rising 82% between 2003 and 2013 and giving rise to charts like the one below. But there’s also the issue of tailoring. There might not be a textbook that’s a perfect match for a given instructor’s needs, but the traditional model requires students to purchase material their instructors may have no interest in teaching.

Authors from a variety of fields are making strides to bring accessible and open educational resources that provide educators with choice regarding the price and contents of course materials. Legal education, which relies in large part on public domain texts like cases and statutes, is particularly poised for change. Authors Alliance members, committed to authorship in the public interest, are leading the charge.

STM’s “Open Access” Licenses: Extend, Embrace, and Extinguish

Posted August 18, 2014

Guest-blogged by Authors Alliance founding member Ariel Katz, Associate Professor of Law and Innovation Chair in Electronic Commerce at the University of Toronto.

Authors Alliance recently joined a coalition of research, science, and education organizations that called on the Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) to withdraw a set of New Model Licenses for purportedly “open access” publishing.

Beyond the flaws in those Model Licenses, the STM move raises some potentially serious antitrust issues. In other words, by adopting these set of model licenses and recommending that their members adopt them, STM and its member publishers might have broken the law. This is problematic for authors who write to be read, and who deserve a competitive publishing environment that allows them to find publishers who share their commitment to openness.

Authors Alliance Joins Call for STM to Withdraw its Open Access Licenses

Posted August 11, 2014

Authors Alliance firmly believes in the importance of open licensing to vibrant and productive scholarship. But open licensing is legally complex and simply calling a license “open” does not make it so. We need open licenses that work to promote access and that enable open resources from various publication platforms to be used together in innovative ways.

The Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) recently released a set of model licenses for use in open access publication. Unfortunately, these licenses do not actually provide the openness they promise. Instead, each license places significant restrictions on reuse of covered publications, including a vague and ominous prohibition on “misrepresent[ing]” the “meaning, interpretation, context and conclusions” of a covered work. Even worse, the licenses are incompatible with existing standard licenses (including Creative Commons licenses), and they will therefore cause more confusion and expense than progress.

Accordingly, Authors Alliance has joined with more than fifty other organizations in calling for STM to withdraw its licenses.

Authors Alliance wants a world in which, as the letter says, knowledge “is accessible, usable, reusable and interoperable.” Going forward, we should “work within the legal frameworks that have already been globally adopted as a base for building the rest of the tools we need to make this a reality.”

Read the letter (web)
Download the letter (figshare)

Why Digital Humanities Researchers Support Google’s Fair Use Defense

Posted July 31, 2014

Guest-blogged by Authors Alliance member Matthew Sag, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Authors Alliance supports Google’s fair use defense because it helps authors reach readers. Matthew provides another reason why this case is important to the advancement of knowledge and scholarship.

Earlier this month a group of more than 150 researchers, scholars and educators with an interest in the ‘Digital Humanities’ joined an amicus brief urging the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to side with Google in this dispute. Why would so many teachers and academics from fields ranging from Computer Science, English Literature, History, Law, to Linguistics care about this lawsuit? It’s not because they are worried about Google—Google surely has the resources to look after itself—but because they are concerned about the future of academic inquiry in a world of ‘big data’ and ubiquitous copyright.

For decades now, physicists, biologists and economists have used massive quantities of data to explore the world around them. With increases in computing power, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing, and the mass digitization of texts, researchers in the humanities can apply these techniques to the study of history, literature, language and so much more.

Why the Authors Alliance Amicus Brief Supports Google’s Fair Use Defense

Posted July 10, 2014

By Authors Alliance co-founder Pamela Samuelson.

It was nearly a decade ago that the Authors Guild and three of its members brought a class action lawsuit against Google. It charged that Google’s digitization of in-copyright books from major research library collections for its Book Search project was copyright infringement. The plaintiffs have asked for an award of $3 billion in statutory damages against Google and an injunction to remove Book Search from the Internet.

What a tragedy it would be if the Authors Guild prevailed in this lawsuit—and not just for members of the public who have come to depend on Book Search to find information, but also for the overwhelming majority of authors who want their books to be discoverable through full-text searchable databases such as Book Search.

Google’s main defense has always been that this scanning was fair use because it helps users to find books containing information relevant to their queries without harming the market for the books. Indeed, by providing links to online stores from which the books can be purchased, Book Search is likely to enhance the marketability of books in this database.

Google won its fair use at a lower court last fall. The Authors Guild appeal is now pending before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which has long been the most influential court on copyright issues. Oral argument will likely occur in the fall. A decision on the merits should be rendered in the first half of 2015.

The Authors Alliance has today filed a brief in support of the lower court’s fair use ruling. The Alliance has an interest in this litigation because a substantial proportion of our members have books in the Book Search database. Several dozens of books written by Alliance Advisory Board members can, for instance, be found through Book Search. They includes nine by Harvard historian Robert Darnton, seven by Lawrence Lessig, five by Michigan economist Paul Courant, four by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, three by former President of the Modern Language Association Sidonie Smith, and one by Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus. Because Authors Alliance members want their books to be found, the organization supports Google’s fair use defense in this case.

Authors Alliance joins in letter against copyright term extensions in TPP

Posted July 9, 2014

Authors Alliance is joining 34 other organizations in telling the negotiators of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) not to extend copyright terms beyond the current international minimums. The international group signing the letter includes representatives of libraries, archives, educators, and authors; leaders such as the Association of Research Libraries, Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, the Canadian Library Association, and the Australian Library and Information Association.

The prevailing international standard already provides a copyright terms that last fifty years after an author’s death, a term that is more than adequate by any metric. Among the Authors Alliance proposals for copyright reform is “no more copyright term extensions.” As we explained there, further lengthening the copyright would not help most authors:

Term extensions do not promote the progress of science, as the Constitution directs, and often actively constrain it. Copyright terms are already very long . . . Only a very few works continue to provide economic benefit to authors for the full duration of our current terms. For the vast majority of new works, a longer term would provide no new reward at all, while it would instead starve the public domain and orphan our cultural and intellectual heritage. Without a demonstrated need or definite public benefit, we oppose any attempt to lengthen the copyright terms yet again.

Here in the United States, the copyright term has already been extended twenty years past the international standard. Our experience of longer terms has not been increased creativity or increased author wealth. The change has proven to benefit only the smallest handful of rights holders, while preventing works from entering the public domain. Documented experience as well as economic prediction weigh heavily against efforts to further lengthen the copyright term in other countries.

We encourage other organizations to join us and many others in telling the negotiators that current copyright terms are more than enough to protect authors like us by signing the letter here.

Why Does the Authors Alliance Care About Orphan Works?

Posted July 2, 2014

By Authors Alliance co-founder Pamela Samuelson.

During the Authors Alliance launch at the Internet Archive, I talked about why the problem of orphan works is one of the pressing concerns the Authors Alliance seeks to address with its Principles and Proposals for Copyright Reform. Many of us, including academics, biographers, writers of historical fiction, and documentary filmmakers, come across many documents relevant to our research projects that we want to include in our works.

Sometimes we can tell that the documents are in the public domain, and sometimes we can easily track down the owners of in-copyright works and ask for permission. But many times, especially with older documents, it is unclear who the author is, how to track him or her down, or who else might have rights in the work.

Confusion about who is the author or owner of the rights is, of course, not an excuse to ignore copyright interests. There is general consensus that a prospective reuser should have to conduct a reasonably diligent search for the copyright owner, but copyright should not unreasonably impede reuse of the work if no owner can be found.

It’s Elementary My Dear Watson*: The Public Domain Can Benefit Authors

Posted June 17, 2014

Illustration of Holmes and Watson by Sidney Paget (1860-1908) in Strand Magazine

By Authors Alliance co-founder Molly Van Houweling.

Yesterday Judge Richard Posner, writing for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, ruled that the copyrights in stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle and published before 1923 have expired, clearing the way for the publication of an anthology of new stories featuring Doyle’s famous detective Sherlock Holmes. Leslie S. Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd. (June 16, 2014). The expiration of copyright might sound like bad news for authors. But it can be very good news, indeed, and this case illustrates some of the reasons why.

The lawsuit was brought by an author–not Arthur Conan Doyle of course (who, as Judge Posner noted in his opinion, died 84 years ago), but rather a living author and editor named Leslie Klinger. In 2011, Klinger co-edited A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon, an anthology of stories written by contemporary authors but featuring Sherlock Holmes and other characters from Doyle’s classic stories. Doyle’s estate demanded a $5000 copyright licensing fee, which Klinger’s publisher paid. But when the estate again demanded a licensing fee for the publication of Klinger’s planned sequel, In the Company of Sherlock Holmes, Klinger resisted. He asked a federal court to back him up by ruling (in what’s known as a “declaratory judgment”) that the copyright protection attached to the characters who would appear in the stories had expired and that In the Company of Sherlock Holmes could therefore be published without copyright permission or fee.