Presentation given at the London School of Economics conference on Open Access Futures in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 24 October 2013

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Brian Hole
LSE, Open Access Futures in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 24 October 2013
Open access

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Overview
 Why publish?
 What is open access?
 Licenses
 Publishing vs. archiving
 Benefits vs.
disadvantages

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The Social Contract
of Science
• Validation
• Dissemination
• Further development
Scientific Malpractice
• Data
• Results
• Software

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What is Open Access?

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Most simply:
No barriers to access or reuse

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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.
Budapest Open Access Initiative
OA allows users to “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and
to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible
purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.”
Bethsida/Berlin statements
✔ ✗ ✗

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‘Gold open access’ (publishing)
• Publisher makes content freely available
• Content has been through peer
review, anti-plagiarism checks, etc.
• Publisher may require an article
processing charge (APC)
OA publishing vs. archiving
‘Green open access’ (archiving)
• Institution makes a pre-publication
version of content freely available in
own repository, with no charge
• Content is released early and
immediately

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Disadvantages vs. benefits

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• “Humanities research involves reuse of copyright material
and therefore can’t use CC-BY”
Often cited CC-BY disadvantages for the humanities
• “I don’t want my work to be translated without my oversight
and quality control”
• “Open access will increase the likelihood of plagiarism”
• “I will lose royalties if my book is available for free”
CC-BY: “You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author
or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your
use of the work).”
Fair use and fair dealing still permitted. What we really need are copyright
exceptions, and to encourage the release of more material as OA.
Attribution is still required. Plagiarism is actually easier to detect when the
source is openly available.
It’s early days for OA books, but current indications are that royalties are
stable to higher. Publishers like UP don’t aim to profit from royalties.

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• “Open access means low quality peer review”
• “Citation metrics don’t work in the humanities”
• “Open access is too expensive for the humanities”
• “Open access is a threat to academic freedom”
• “Someone will create a derivative of my work and copyright it”
Derivatives are allowed, and if sufficiently original can also be copyright
protected. But this does not affect the copyright of the original work.
Peer review is completely independent of the distribution system. This has
not happened STM.
Why not? Use of citation metrics alone is problematic in all fields. Half-
lives are longer and therefore metrics need to be looked at in context.
Open access clearly increases freedom in very many areas. Mandates do
not have to restrict authors to certain journals only - publishers just need
to adapt.
High fees and “double dipping” need to be discouraged. APCs don’t have
to be high – many OA journals don’t charge them at all, and publishers can
be sustainable at low cost (see next slide).

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