Why Full Open Access Matters

Scientific authors who pay to publish their articles in an open-access publication should be congratulated for doing so. They also should be aware that they may not be getting full open access from some publications that charge for publication under the “open access” label. Two features define an open-access publication: (1) the published contents are freely accessible through the Internet, and (2) readers are given copyright permission (see Box 1) to republish or reuse the content as they like so long as the author and publisher receive proper attribution [1]. Recently, some publications have begun offering an open-access option that charges for Internet publication without granting readers full reuse rights, such as Springer's Open Choice or Nature's Scientific Reports. These publishers have adopted a business model through which authors pay for immediate publication on the Internet but the publisher nonetheless keeps commercial reuse rights for itself. This is not full open access (see Box 2). Box 1. A (Very) Brief Primer on Copyright For those with an appetite for more details on copyright's mechanics, here goes. Copyright is a set of exclusive rights given to authors to control most reuses of their work without their permission, subject to certain limitations and exceptions to these rights. The theory that justifies copyright is that authors will use these rights either to self-publish or to entice a publisher to remunerate the author and to invest in publishing and distributing the work without fear of unauthorized republication by others. Authors automatically receive copyright at the moment they fix their work in some digital or analog media. (In the United States, old rules required a copyright registration to obtain a copyright, or, later, simply that the work be published with a copyright notice, ©, or copyright would be forfeited. However, since 1978, copyright has been granted automatically at the moment of creation, and since March 1, 1989, copyright has been retained by the copyright owner even if the copyright symbol is not used on publications.) Under US law, authors can transfer all or part of their copyright if they do so by signing an agreement to this effect. Subscription-based journals usually require authors to transfer all or part of their copyright to the journal as a term of the publication agreement, and usually designate one author as the “corresponding author” who signs on the others' behalf. This is because the subscription model requires publishers to restrict access to paying customers and to use the threat of a copyright infringement lawsuit as a means of deterring competing publications from republishing or reusing the journal's content without a license. Alternatively, the grant of copyright permission, (also known as a non-exclusive license) can be done verbally or by conduct indicating that permission has been granted. In the case where authors never sign a publication agreement, the publisher has a non-exclusive license and the authors retain copyright. The open-access model uses this permission model to grant readers broad reuse rights to encourage the widespread republication and reuse of articles. Open-access publishers do not need to police the behavior of readers or rival publishers except to the extent that journal content is reused without giving the author or the journal proper credit. The standard means for granting readers permission is through a Creative Commons Attribution license [3]. (Disclosure: I sit on the Board of Creative Commons.) With respect to scientific articles, the “author(s)” who get the copyright are sometimes different than the persons listed as authors on a scientific article. Scholarly norms about who receives authorship credit vary by discipline and usually are based on some measure of contribution to a collaborative research undertaking. The extreme case is in high energy physics, in which one article boasts 2,926 authors [9]! In the life sciences this phenomenon usually is related to large-scale clinical trials, such as one article reporting the work of 972 researchers [10]. For copyright purposes, however, authorship is limited to the persons who translate facts and ideas into expression by writing text, creating figures, structuring the data, creating data visualizations, and so on. Within this subset of contributors who count as authors in copyright's eyes, there is one copyright shared equally by the authors responsible for these forms of expression if they had a mutual intent to create an integrated work. Otherwise, if, for example, a figure were created for independent purposes and was then later included in an article, there would be two copyrights owned independently by the respective creators—one in the figure and another in the text. Traditional copyright is premised on the idea that the authors' and publishers' incentives are aligned because both seek to profit from the publication and distribution of the authors' work. However, this one-size-fits-all approach does not fit scholarly communication—at least in journal form—in which author royalties are the extremely rare exception. Authors write for impact. As scientific publishing has migrated to digital networks, full open access better achieves scientific authors' goals than does the traditional publishing model designed for the production and distribution of printed artifacts. Box 2. Requirements for Full Open Access Full open access content is * Easily accessible online AND * Available to anyone free of charge AND * Available for re-use without restriction except that attribution be given to the source. No one of these alone qualifies content for an open access label. Getting open access right matters because the new publishing model is designed to increase the pace and impact of scientific communication through the power of the Internet. Immediate, free publication increases the audience for scientific research and overcomes the increasingly high price barrier to access imposed by the traditional, subscription-based publishing model [2]. N.B., this audience is comprised of both human readers and their computers, which function more effectively when browsing text on the open web. Liberal reuse rights permit users to republish, quote liberally, and to overcome language barriers through translation [3]. To accomplish these important objectives, the open-access model makes two structural changes to the traditional, subscription-based model. The first is to shift the financing for publication from readers, through subscription fees, to authors (often through their funders), through article processing fees. The second is to shift from a model that uses copyright to control reuse of content to one that uses copyright to encourage republication, preservation, and translation.