The scholarly publishing landscape is changing very rapidly; publishers are increasingly imposing fees (article processing charges or APCs) on authors for publishing open access.
Creative Commons licences are the most popular open licences among open scholarship and open access projects around the world; CC puts the “open” in OER and OA. This chapter will introduce you to the specifics of using CC licences and CC-licensed content for scholarly purposes.
Open access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access stands in contrast to the dominant “closed” commercial publishing system for communicating scientific and scholarly research. This current approach is slow, expensive, and ill-suited for research collaboration and discovery. And even though scholarly research is largely produced as a result of public funding, the results are often hidden behind technical, legal, and financial barriers or paywalls. Open access publishing is an alternative model—one that takes full advantage of digital technologies, the web, and open licensing to provide free access to scholarship which enables sharing and reuse.
Learning Outcomes
define Open Access
explain the benefits of Open Access for your learners and for researchers at your institution
understand how authors can make their own works Open Access
The Big Question/Why It Matters
The purpose of scientific inquiry is the fundamental search for knowledge. Teaching, the open exchange of ideas, and the process of publishing original research are all methods by which academic faculty, learners, staff, and others contribute to advancing scholarship.
How well do current information access and sharing practices within the university system reflect and support the stated goals of research and scholarship?
This chapter explores how the practice of Open Access publishing aligns with the goals of improving access to knowledge.
Personal Reflection/Why it Matters To You
How does your institution support (or not) the open publication of research? How do you interact with learners and faculty searching for academic research? Have you ever encountered a paywall while trying to access research articles?
Acquiring Essential Knowledge
Open Access
As defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, Open Access (OA) to research means free “availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of [research] 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.”
Important components of the OA model include:
Authors keep their copyright
No embargo period
Share the research data with the article
Add a Creative Commons licence to the research article that enables text and data mining (any of the non-ND licences work, but CC BY is preferred)
See the Budapest +10 recommendations and the Budapest +20 recommendations for best practices in creating, adopting and implementing OA policies and processes. For example, “when possible, funder policies should require libre OA (with little or no restriction), preferably under a CC-BY licence or equivalent.”
Scholarly Publishing Today
First, read the Wikipedia article on scholarly communication. This article defines scholarly communication as “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs” or preprint servers.
In the all-rights reserved commercial publishing ecosystem, authors are usually required to sign a publishing contract that includes giving copyright to the publisher, which usually means the author has no control over their work and has to ask permission to reuse it.
Publishers have become the de facto rights holders to scientific research; they also provide access to these materials to university libraries, research institutions, and the public—typically for a significant fee. This leads to a cyclical situation in which for-profit publishers essentially sell back access to the scientific and scholarly record that academics originally produced through public funds. Even after a publishing embargo (six months to perhaps, thee years) expires, access to publicly funded scientific research remains limited.
There are several critiques of the traditional academic publishing system. SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has a summary of the key points on its Open Access page.
As journal subscription prices outpace library budgets, academic libraries are forced to make difficult decisions—often having to cancel subscriptions or shift money away from other budget items. According to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the average cost of serial subscriptions for ARL member libraries increased by about 9% per year since 2003.
Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) is the lead organisation in Australia to negotiate consortia subscription deals with for profit publishers on behalf of Australian Universities. In recent years CAUL has negotiated Read and Publish agreements with publishers and has progressively moved to encourage open access publishing.
Open Access Publishing
The “closed access” publishing system limits the impact of the scientific and scholarly community and progress is slowed significantly. Open Access literature is defined by scholar Peter Suber as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.”
Public funding bodies in Australia such as the NHMRC and the ARC have open access publishing policies for research outputs they have funded. Publishing in an open access journal usually means the author retains copyright of their work although some publishers still require exclusive publishing rights. Most open access scholarly articles are published under a variety of Creative Commons (CC) licences. However some commercial publishers insist on more restrictive CC licences than the most open which is CC BY.
Open Access authors have the opportunity to publish in a few ways depending on the publishing agreement they have signed with the publisher.
This table has been adapted from the Open Access Australasia Open Access 101 course materials 2023
Common descriptor of open access options
Alternate descriptor
Explanation
Green
Open repository
Free to publish
Free to read
Preprints
Author accepted manuscripts (AAM)
The publishing contract allows the author to add the AAM to an institutional or open repository and made publicly available after any embargo period has lapsed. This form of open access is usually associated with subscription journals that are behind a paywall. This option is good as it enables publication in a quality scholarly journal and eventual open access without an author publishing charge. A CC license is usually applied to the AAM.
Free to publish
Free to read
Community driven journals
Institutionally supported journals
These kinds of journals are usually run on volunteer labour, are free to publish as well as free to read and are not tied to any commercial publisher. Published content usually has a CC licence applied.
Gold
Pay to publish in a fully open access journal
Free to read
Publisher journals (commercial journals)
This method of publishing open access usually includes an article processing charge (APC). Charges may range from several hundred dollars to $15,000 plus for very highly respected journals. Publishers will usually apply a CC licence to the open access article with or without an exclusive publishing right.
Hybrid
Pay article processing charge to publish OA which is then free to read
Other articles in that journal may not be OA and access is behind a paywall
Hybrid journals contain some open access articles and some restricted access articles. Readers pay a full subscription to these journals to get full access. It means hybrid journals are double dipping in fees and charges.
Bronze
Freely available to read
No open licence
Not shareable or reusable
Strictly speaking this option does not fully comply with open access principles as there is no open licence.
Black
Illegally downloaded or pirated versions of articles
Strictly speaking this form is illegal and not condoned by the research community and does not adhere to ethical concerns in scholarly publishing.
Some for-profit publishers are pushing against the open publishing movement and imposing fees for peer review and for making the author-accepted manuscript open access via a repository
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a site that indexes open access journals and their contents. HowOpenIsIt? is a handy tool for evaluating the relative “openness” of publishing from full open access to closed access. Sherpa Romeo is a UK JISC service where users can discover if their preferred journal allows some form of open access publishing and if there are article publishing charges.
Understanding Author Publishing Rights
By understanding copyright and the various scholarly publishing options, authors can more effectively navigate the publishing ecosystem as they publish research. Understanding what an author gives up when they transfer their copyright to a publisher is critical; if unsure ask your librarian for assistance. For example, scholarly authors who transfer copyright could lose the ability to post their research on their own websites or reuse their work without permission.
Several tools exist to help academics and scholars understand their rights and publishing options and to help them exercise those rights. The Scholars Copyright Addendum Engine can be used by authors to amend publication agreements when submitting an article to a traditional publisher. The engine allows authors to choose among different options to reserve rights for themselves and generates an agreement that is then submitted with a traditional publication agreement to make that legally effective. Additionally, the Authors Alliance publishes myriad resources about these tools and open access, and PLOS offers resources and articles about the benefits of open access as well.
University Policies
Many universities have adopted open access policies that require university-affiliated researchers to grant to their institution a non-exclusive license to a scholarly article at the time of creation of the work. This process heads off problems with publishers downstream, since the university retains a legal right to the work before copyright is transferred to a publisher. These policies have proliferated under the assumption that universities themselves should be able to access and preserve the research outputs of their faculty. To view an example, review the University of California Open Access Policy. You can also view many other institutional open access policies in the ROARMAP, which has collected several hundred open access policies, including those of universities, research organisations, and academic institutions.
In addition to encouraging the development of open access policies at the university level, public policies can ensure that publicly funded research be made available under Open Access terms. This typically is accomplished through the inclusion of sharing requirements tied to receiving government or philanthropic grant funds. When funding cycles for research include deposit and/or open license requirements for publications, increased access and opportunities for reuse extends the value of research funding.
Universities play a major role in advancing scientific research, and academic publishing is a key way for faculty to communicate findings with colleagues and the public. Library staff play a key role in supporting academics and researchers in facilitating open access and choosing a Creative Commons licence.
Quiz: Open Access to Scholarship
Choosing a CC Licence for Open Science Publishing
Not all scholarly materials available under a CC licence comply with open science initiatives including the F.A.I.R. principles. Review this chart that details which CC licences work well for scholarly resources and which do not. F.A.I.R. principles often refer to research data but can also refer more generally to research outputs.
The two CC NoDerivatives (ND) licences are not compatible licences with F.A.I.R. principles because they do not allow the public to revise or remix the resource. Because the ND licenses do not meet the 5Rs or any of the major OER definitions, the open education movement does not consider ND-licensed education resources “OER.”
Choosing the right licence for your scholarly works requires you to think about which permissions you want to give to other users—and which permissions you want to retain for yourself. Read some of the arguments made about the CC BY licence for publishing scientific research in “Why CC BY?” from the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. Richard White, guest writer for Open Access Australasia presents some benefits of open licencing of research outputs.
For basic information about the licences, how to choose and apply one to your work or combined works from other people and sources, revisit Section 4.1.
