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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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A Closer Look at Open Access
Kaitlin Thaney · Boston (United States) · Mar 07th, 2007 12:52 pm · 28 votes · no comments made
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 This is the first in a series of articles written to provide a better understanding of Science Commons and shed light on how the principles of Open Access tie into Creative Commons' efforts in the sciences.
The words 'open access' have gradually made their way into the vocabularies of academics, researchers, public servants and other members of the public. But what do those two words combined mean? How does Creative Commons copyright licensing tie into this? And how are CC's efforts in science ' the Science Commons ' extending the idea?
For starters, let's first look at 'Open Access' (OA). OA is a movement to open up the vast amounts of scholarly and scientific literature generated each year and published in peer-reviewed journals. It is a reaction to the combined problem of high prices for such literature and lack of democratic access to the canon of scholarly knowledge, and has its roots in a set of declarations known by the cities in which they were crafted: Budapest, Berlin, and Bethesda.
For more background on OA ' links to papers, software, research and more 'please see the Framework for Open Science that came out of the 2006 iSummit. But when we speak of OA, we tend to use the definition from the Budapest declaration:
'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. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."
This is essentially the idea behind the Creative Commons BY license . It recognizes the need to move knowledge around in science and scholarly work, as well as the rights of the authors to control the integrity of their scholarly output. And we will return in a later article to the centrality of the right to pass scholarly articles to software as data. But for now, let's focus on the access and pricing problems, which lead to different modalities of OA.
There are two main branches recognised in the OA movement: the 'green' road and the 'gold' road. The first pertains to OA self-archiving, where authors publish in a subscription-based journal, then make their articles freely accessible in a repository after-the-fact. (see, E-Print Archive, arXiv) The other branch ' the 'gold' road ' involves authors publishing in Open Access journals initially, making their works freely accessible online from the time of publication. (see, BioMed Central, Public Library of Science, Hindawi).
Making one's scholarly works and information available in such a way maximizes the impact of that research by making the content readily available to a much broader audience with less restrictions than other traditional models. Enter Creative Commons' licenses, used by OA publishers (those on the 'gold' road) to guarantee the content is freely accessible, with perhaps other rights attached to them. Not only is the price barrier eased but more flexibility and freedoms are attached in regards to how the content is made available, shared and/or reused.
These OA principles tie directly into our Scholar's Copyright Project, explicitly embedded into each of our Author's Addenda. The individual addenda allow authors to retain some of their rights over their works through the self-archiving road of OA (the 'green' road). Currently, restrictions exist that inhibit self-archiving that mandate copyright assignments from the authors, further alienating the rights an author holds over their work. Beyond attaching copyright restrictions, these agreements also often add lines dictating when an article can be released to the public (if at all), file formats and location of the archives. All of these restrictions create legal and technical barriers preventing material from being shared and made freely available.
This is the foundation for what we do here at Science Commons. Our other projects ' the Neurocommons, Materials Transfer, SC-Data project ' are each built on the promise of OA, remixing the principles behind Creative Commons licenses. In the next installment, we'll take a closer look at how the underlying principles of open access are built on these notions.
Image: Courtesy of Public Library of Science. CC BY 2.5
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