(Creative) Commons Ground
Open Access Licensing and Notes on the OSTP Nelson Memo
Good morning from Shelf Life, where we implore you to understand the difference between open access and free access. If you don’t, fear not. You will learn all the secrets within.
Free access usually just means something is not behind a paywall. It’s free to access. That does not have any implications for licensing or reusing the content; it just refers to how end users access the content. Open access is a different and much more complicated thing.
Open access means a lot of things; broadly, it’s a principle of information freedom—that access to information and the electronic media that carry the information should be free and available to everyone, equally. In publishing, open access usually refers to a type of license a rights holder can secure for their intellectual property that conveys a handful of rights to any individual who wishes to exercise them:
Distribute;
Remix;
Adapt; and
Build upon the original work.
Depending on the license attached to the original work (the work being distributed, remixed, adapted, et cetera) may be used for noncommercial purposes only, or for both commercial and noncommercial purposes. Creation of derivative works may be restricted or unrestricted. Open access licenses may require “sharealike” terms, meaning any new works created from the original must be licensed under identical (open access) terms. The main restriction all these licenses share in common is that the creator of the original work must be credited for their work (attribution).
What kinds of things can be distributed under an open access license? Anything that falls under copyright law in the United States, so, lots of things—books, plays, movies, research and scholarly communications, articles, websites, music—even software. Maybe especially software.
Open access licensing can be applied to works of fiction like novels, too, not just scholarly and nonfiction books and other writing. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow has published a number of novels under Creative Commons licenses, including the first novel published under CC licensing, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. There’s a case study about it.
That said, open access seems biggest, in my experience, in scientific scholarly publishing and in software. And I don’t know much about software, I just know open access and open source are big movements in software development (read up on Copyleft here). Helpfully, I do know a couple of things about scientific publishing.
Open science is a movement that seeks to make scientific information free and accessible to all—not just other scientists and paying customers like libraries, but to everybody. I’m not going to get into all the principles of open science today but open access for scientific publications is one of those principles. I’ll also just note that open research is a close cousin to open science but they’re not synonymous.
Sometimes research is free to do and sometimes it’s really, really expensive. Research doesn’t always mean a lab or a library. I could conduct research on what type of vegetable my dogs like best using these two chuckleheads and the contents of my fridge (spoiler alert: it’s carrots). If I want to do research on what kinds of things you can see with the Hubble Space Telescope or what treatment regimen works best for a specific disease, that’s going to be very expensive. Individuals don’t have that kind of money laying around to do research. The research is ultimately going to be funded by industry (like the pharmaceutical company who makes the treatment regimen) or the government (for instance, the National Institutes of Health [NIH]).
Let’s say the NIH pays in full or in part for Dr Mario to conduct research on which color of vitamin capsule works best to destroy viruses. When the study is finished, who owns the product of that research? Is it Dr Mario? Or the lab at which he works? Or, if NIH funded the research, and the US taxpayers fund the NIH, doesn’t that research kind of belong to us? Didn’t we pay for it?
Disclaimer: Do not accept pills from Dr Mario. He is not a licensed physician.
Let’s say, further, that Dr Mario’s study found that blue vitamins kill viruses 50 percent better than red vitamins. That’s like landmark science right there. That has big implications for treating viruses down the line. Dr Mario doesn’t just call up all his friends and say “hey it’s a me and I want you to stop using the red vitamin to treat patients with viruses.” For all we know, Dr Mario might have just made up his results or maybe his methodology was flawed in some way. Dr Mario writes his findings up in a scientific paper and then he sends them to a journal for peer review.
Peer review means the journal’s editors send the paper out to Dr Mario’s peers, whoever those are, maybe Dr Robotnik, and those peers review the methodology and findings to make sure they are sound. If they are, and the journal publishes the paper, all of Dr Mario’s peers (who access the journal, anyway) can see the findings and try to replicate the results. That’s how the research is validated. Other doctors start comparing blue and red vitamin efficacy and if they, too, find that the blue vitamin kills viruses better, then the research findings are validated.
The issue is that the journal may not make Dr Mario’s paper freely available to all. It may be secured behind a paywall. There are reasons for this; a big reason is that staff (like me), who coordinate things like peer review, editing, and online publication, have to be paid. Some journals do not have costly operations and some do.
But the US government and its taxpayers have an argument: If we paid for this research, then we should have access to the findings. Why is the journal allowed to place it behind a paywall?
I don’t have an answer to this, by the way. I agree that findings from publicly funded research should be publicly available but I also know what it takes to run a major scholarly journal and that cannot be done solely by volunteers, however dedicated. Especially in medical science, too much is riding on the information we disseminate being right. Somebody needs to be back here in the office making sure μ didn’t accidentally get replaced with m because if when a doctor gives a patient 15mg instead of 15μg of a drug, sometimes that patient dies.
The Nelson Memo, called after its author Dr Alondra Nelson of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (hence it is sometimes also called the OSTP memo), specifically in part 3a, stipulates:
Federal agencies should update or develop new public access plans for ensuring, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, that all peer-reviewed scholarly publications authored or coauthored by individuals or institutions resulting from federally funded research are made freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.
Put another way, if research was funded by a federal agency (like NIH), the memo directs that agency to require that the research be made freely and publicly available immediately upon publication, specifically using an agency-designated repository (eg, something like PubMed Central). This means publishers will no longer be able to keep federally funded research behind a paywall for a set amount of time before releasing it publicly.
That’s a lot of background on what open access is and why it’s becoming more and more common, especially in scholarly publications. But if you, Jane Q. Writer, would like to secure an open access license for your work—how do you do that?
In the United States, and scholarly publishing generally, as far as I know, Creative Commons is pretty much synonymous with open access licensing. And getting a license from them is really easy. They have a page where you “choose your license” by inputting the restrictions under which you would like your work to be licensed. For instance, selecting “no” sharing and “no” commercial use results in the CC BY-NC-ND— Creative Commons (CC), attribution required (BY, as in, it’s by Jane Q. Writer), noncommercial (NC), no derivatives (ND). That’s probably the most restrictive license, with CC BY (meaning, can be shared or reused in any way as long as it’s attributed to the original author) is the most lenient.
The license types, for reference, are:
CC BY (attribution only)
CC BY-SA (attribution and sharealike)
CC BY-NC (attribution, noncommercial)
CC BY-NC-SA (attribution, noncommercial, sharealike)
CC BY-ND (attribution, no derivatives)
CC BY-NC-ND (attribution, noncommercial no derivatives)
Why no combo with SA and ND? Because sharealike applies to derivative work.
Once you’ve chosen your license and navigated to the page that displays the full license, you will see a link at the bottom of the page that says “use the license for your own material”:
(The highlight is from me. That’s not part of their site.) Clicking that link will take you to the instructions on how to display your open access license.
A caveat: Once you have published something under a Creative Commons license, you cannot revoke that license just as you cannot unpublish your work (discussed in Publishing and Unpublishing). An open access license does not preclude you from profiting from your work. You may still sell that work, and people may still choose to purchase it, even though it is also available for free. However, most publishers of commercial work and fiction will not be interested in republishing something that already exists under an open access license, unless they can see a clear path to making a significant profit off something that is freely available.
Choose your license carefully, if you do at all, just as you would choose your publication event carefully.
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