A fundamental principle of open access is that publication technology enables the widest possible audience for research findings. However, t
"We find that half of all report downloads are used for non-academic purposes, including to improve the provision of services by medical professionals, local and regional planners, public health workers, and veterans’ advocates, to name just a few of the 64 total categories of report use. Heavy use is made of Academies reports on STEM education and how people learn by teachers, school administrators and teachers’ coaches. Other notable reports with their prominent users included Dying in America (chaplains), Nutrient Requirements for Beef Cattle (farmers), and Best Care at Lower Costs (clinicians and hospital administrators)."
"Librarians and open access advocates have long presupposed that open access to high-quality scientific knowledge could and should be viewed as a public good. Our empirical research suggests that the initial utopian aspirations regarding the public use and societal impact of OA may indeed rest on sound footing."
WASHINGTON, DC – Today a group of colleagues from the Association of American Universities, Association of Research Libraries, and Association of University Presses met to advance the Towards an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) initiative. It was heartening to see the progress the initiative has made since our first gathering in the summer of 2016. At the time, I was enthusiastic about the effort…
The New York Times charged two scholars $1,884 for three quoted passages, each roughly 100 words long, in their new book on health coverage. Fair?
What a mess. Routledge is pretty clearly the bad guy, here (if there is a bad guy...see postscript about the importance of communication), not the New York Times. The 50 word limit comes from Routledge (this article explains that Routledge insists on permission beyond that threshold, as a matter of policy), and the Times says very clearly that their only role here is taking money that Routledge's policy requires authors to pay, according to the standard rates they charge for any commercial user. The NYT's position seems reasonable: you can do fair use all day, just don't expect us to be your lawyers. It's Routledge who are being hyper conservative and forcing the scholars to pay.
This is common in my experience. Publishers are the key gatekeepers when it comes to fair use in scholarly writing, because they are the ones with "deep" pockets (relative to humble authors, anyway) who will be sued if a rightsholder gets angry. It is their decision, in the first instance, whether to take on whatever risk attends the publication of a work that exercises fair use.
In this case, Routledge seems to err very far on the side of caution and force authors to pay needless permission fees to alleviate their imagined risk. If someone else is paying, why not? If I told you that I'm willing to pay to insure your house against flying saucer attacks, would you turn me down? It's probably a waste, but it's not your money, and hey, maybe there will be a flying saucer attack!
Authors, especially academics, have got to push back and either insist publishers recognize their fair use rights (which are so compelling in cases like this) or, at a minimum, insist that the publisher bear the costs of seeking permission (including the cost of finding the right person to pay) if they exercise excessive caution.
What these authors have done is to outsource the cost of Routledge's risk-aversion to their Kickstarter supporters, while blaming the New York Times. Two big mistakes, IMO.
Postscript: It is worth mentioning that many publishers are quite amenable to fair use claims if you're willing to do a modicum of education and persuasion. The College Art Association has had remarkable success in the world of scholarly publishing about art. My clinic students helped multiple scholarly author clients convince presses to put out books relying, in part, on fair use. I've even heard, through the grapevine, of Routledge itself publishing a book with substantial fair uses incorporated. A policy of respecting fair use would be better, obviously, but if you just accept default rules about permission, that's partly on you as the author.
Faculty members learned a few weeks ago that one of the many small services the library offers was cut. It used to be that if an instructor needed a DVD for a class they could get it delivered. That service has been stopped. The instructor now has to get it from the Sound and Moving Image Library (SMIL). The stoppage has annoyed and will hamper many instructors on campus. This isn’t the first service cut, however, nor will it be the last. It was just a visible one.
The root cause of this cut was budget cuts. Like everyone else, York University Libraries (YUL) is suffering from cuts, but we don’t talk about them much. That should change.
Bill Denton, York University Libraries (my previous place of employment) on budget cuts for the York University Faculty Association Blog.
Up to now, open access has been largely an economic addition to the traditional subscription model among research libraries.
What has yet to be fully worked out is a viable financial model for libraries to transition from subscription access to open access, and in particular a model that will apply equally well across the disciplines and their organizing bodies.
With this study, we seek to investigate and pilot a new level of cooperation between libraries, journals, societies, and presses in making this transition. It begins with the assumption that the in-excess of ten billion dollars being spent on journals today is more than enough to finance a transition to open access. We do not need to introduce new money into the picture. Libraries, journals, societies, and presses may be able to arrive at cooperative ways of utilizing existing funding to provide open access for all.
A cooperative model of scholarly publishing holds the promise of not only introducing new levels of transparency and rationality to publishing costs, it would bring together stakeholders who share a common purpose in advancing scholarly communication and who have the areas of expertise and infrastructure supported needed to do it.
