A Flexible OA Publishing Agreement Framework

I started out just wanting to tighten and revise an interesting publication agreement I saw online, but since I sometimes deal with academic publishing in my day job, it got me thinking about all the various permutations and so I realized that I'm not aware of any real taxonomy for academics.  Creative Commons does great work for content, and although it started out largely in the software space, it serves as an excellent model.

Not having done extensive research on what else is out there and currently restless and sick, I wanted to jot down some ideas for a mix-and-match Academic Commons for open access publishing, modeled of course on Creative Commons multi-tiered approach. I've not checked any of these names or labels, and haven't dig deeply to see whether someone else is already doing a project like this, but I find it extremely compelling and so I wanted to flesh out my thoughts.

The Shieber Model Publication Agreement: an Analysis

As mentioned in the previous post, Stuart Shieber at Harvard proposed a model OA journal publication agreement on his blog.  In many ways, it is comparable to the simplified agreements made available by the University of Michigan, and Shieber points to another example as a starting point under the label of an "Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing", which some cursory Googling found mostly dead links and a few references to a project from 2010 that may have changed its name or merged with another project since.

That starting point agreement is essentially a CC-BY license with an additional clause granting first publication rights to the journal.  In essence, the journal executing that agreement would become the "official" citation.  It's simple, painless, and also likely inadequate for many journals--even very OA-centric ones.  The UM license is more in the ballpark of a robust, generally OA publication agreement. But while it accomplishes OA ends, it's written as an arrangement between an author and a publisher that permits open access, rather than an agreement for the use of a work that is open access.  Shieber's model is similar, but contains some helpful added specificity.

Open Access Journals: The Publication Agreement Quandary

Open Access (OA) in scholarly publishing is slowly but surely gaining speed and acceptance in the academic community. For many, if not most, younger scientists and scholars, any other arrangement seems nonsensical). Traditionally though, publishers have held a complex role as editors, gatekeepers, disseminators, and custodians of the literature.

So when any postdoc or junior faculty member can pop something out on a blog like this one, what role do the journals play? Editing, peer review, and publishing can all be outsourced or completed with free and open web-based tools, making the prospect of paying journals on both ends for their services (in money and in copyrights) simultaneously less attractive and less necessary.  The world has changed to one of tearing down barriers and crowdsourcing--the gates are wide open.  Self-promotion on Twitter (ahem) connects the community in ways that were only fantasy just 10 years ago (realtime, public interaction from basically anywhere in the world with a cell signal? We're living in the future!).  What's left?