In the last couple of days, the House of Lords (the upper house of the UK government) has issued a call for evidence for a short inquiry into the Government’s open access policy and its implementation by the Research Councils UK (RCUK). The inquiry will cover four main areas: Support for universities through funds to cover article processing charges; Embargo periods for articles published under open access;

[Originally written as a comment on Martin Coward’s blog, but I thought the point was worth making as its own post.] Here’s my take on the widely used Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) in contrast to more restrictive CC licences such as the Non-Commercial variant (CC BY-NC). It may be true, as Martin suggests, that CC BY-NC is better for the author than CC BY. But authors are part of a community, and it’s unquestionably

We know that most academic journals and edited volumes ask authors to sign a copyright transfer agreement before proceeding with publication. When this is done, the publisher becomes the owner of the paper; the author may retain some rights according to the grace or otherwise of the publisher. Plenty of authors have rightly railed against this land-grab, which publishers have been quite unable to justify.

There’s been a lot of concern in some corners of the world about the Finch Report‘s preference for Gold open access, and the RCUK policy‘s similar leaning. Much of the complaining has focussed on the cost of Gold OA publishing: Article Processing Charges (APCs) are very offputting to researchers with limited budgets. I thought it would be useful to provide a page that I (and you) can link to when facing such concerns.

The problem Its often been noted that under the author-pays model of publication (Gold open access), journals have a financial incentive to publish as many articles as possible so as to collect as many article processing charges as possible.

Today, PeerJ announced that it will open for submissions on December 3rd — next Monday. That’s great news for anyone who cares about the future of academic publishing: it’s out to make dramatic changes to the publishing workflow, including an integrated preprint server so that people can read your work while it’s in review.

The best open-access publishers make their articles open from the get-go, and leave them that way forever. (That’s part of what makes them best.) But it’s not unusual to find articles which either start out free to access, then go behind a paywall; or that start out paywalled but are later released; or that live behind a paywall but peek out for a limited period. Let’s talk about these.

In the previous section, we discussed the various licences that can be used for open-access articles. But that may have been premature, because licences are agreements whereby copyright holders waive some of their rights, and we hadn’t actually talked about copyright first. So let’s do that now.

I hope it’s clear to anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while that I do try to be fair to Elsevier (and indeed to everyone). Although I’ve often had occasion to be critical of them, I’ve also been critical of Palaeontologia Electronica , PLOS and Royal Society publishing, among others; and I have praised Elsevier when they’ve done good things.

Thanks for sticking with this series. In part 1, we looked at what open access means, and what terms to use in describing it. In part 2, we considered the Gold and Green roads to open access. In part 3, we touched on zero-cost Gold OA, sometimes known as “Platinum”. This time, we’re going to get down the nitty gritty of the actual licences that govern what you can do with a paper that you’ve downloaded.