Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: For most of the past seven years I had thought I was working to promote open access to academic scholarship and creative works.I helped place more than 40,000 articles and documents in a freely accessible repository, from which they could be (and were) browsed, downloaded, saved, printed, and linked to.But I find now that these efforts failed to meet the standards of the open access advocates as represented by (among others) SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a library membership organization formed and sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries.As was made excruciatingly clear at the March 2012 SPARC meeting in Kansas City, providing unlimited free access to materials is not enough to constitute "open access:" one must also supply unrestricted rights to re-use the materials.I left the convention in a huff, feeling that those of us who operate institutional repositories under the present ground rules had just been thrown under the bus.According to open-access publisher Jan Velterop (2012), "It is about time to stop calling anything Open Access that is not covered by CC-BY, CC-zero, or equivalent.Open Access is well-defined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative..." And truly, it is.Mr. Velterop was among those who issued the Budapest declaration in 2001, so he knows whereof he speaks.The text reads: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.[Emphasis added
Author: Paul Royster
Institution: University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Language: English
Subfield: Library and Information Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2146738743