[TYPES] Open Access: a bit of background (Was: Re: In a letter to the US White House, ACM opposes free distribution of peer-reviewed journal articles)

[Roberto Di Cosmo]

Dear all,
     I'd like to contribute to this very interesting thread by offering some
background on the Open Acces debate, that started almost a quarter of a century
ago, and that may help younger collegues to get an idea of why we ended up
where we are today.

It's important to recall that, no matter the official statements one can read
here and there, the goals of researchers on one side, and traditional scientific
publishers on the other, *have always been quite different*: researchers wanted
access to publications as broad and efficient as possible, and a means to signal
excellence of their work; publishers wanted to run a healthy business, and a
monopoly on their own areas (via mandatory copyright transfer and ownership of
the publication trademarks).

It just turns out that in the pre-Internet era what publishers offered also
satisfied the goals of researchers: the difficult divorce started some twenty
years ago, with the generalisation of the Internet, when sharing papers on the
Web became a *more efficient* means of distibution than having copies of
journals or proceedings sent to thousands of libraries all over the world, and
the publishers' own goals started to become an obstacle to the free
dissemination of science.

Unfortunately, before this divorce started, northern emisphere researchers (*), as
well as funding agencies, had broadly agreed to the conditions imposed by
publishers, in particular mandatory transfer to them of exclusive copyright,
which were not necessary to achieve the researcher's goals.

This had quite disastrous consequences.

On the one hand, it created a gigantic legacy problem: even if we all started
publishing Open Access today, what about the hunderds of thousands of articles
published over the past decades, that are still behind a paywall?

On the other hand, and maybe even worse, it accustomed all the players
(including governments and funding agencies) to accept the idea that the
publishing houses actually *own* the copyright to the articles we write, while
they actually *extort* this copyright from the authors themselves, by forcing
them to relinquish their rights in order to be published, a provision that is in
direct violation of the spirit of copyright itself (in France, it is actually in
violation of the letter of copyright law, see article L.131-4 of the CPI).

You can find a trace of this line of thinking in the wording used in the letter
that started this whole thread, where it mentions "intellectual property"
that belongs to the publishers.

A broader and longer analysis of what is at stake can be found in this early
account I wrote 15 years ago, when some of us had the illusion that Open Access
was going to win soon :

  Scientific Publications: The Role of Public Administrations in The ICT Era, Upgrade, 2006
    + available at: http://www.dicosmo.org/FSP/FATOS-Upgrade-03-2006.pdf
    + french original version available at http://www.dicosmo.org/FSP/FreeAccessToScience.pdf

Cheers

--
Roberto

(*) in Latin America the situation is quite different

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