Open Access (Journals & Copyright)

 “Open Access is FREE, UNRESTRICTED, ONLINE ACCESS.” - Open Access 101 (Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/6973160)

I would like to cheer on the idea of Open Access Journals. When I was working on my dissertation and collecting literature review documents; half of the documents that I needed were not available via my college library database. Sometimes I could request them via inter library loan, which took about 1 week to 2 weeks; other times I would just hope that I did not miss something important when I couldn’t request the articles/books that I needed. It was really frustrating.

The most important topic of OA is copyright. How can authors obtain the copyright when they publish in the OA Journal? Suber (2011) stated that *Fair Use + Public Domain are not enough for Open Access when providing full-text works, therefore, the permission of copyright holder will be needed. Who’s the copyright author of OA materials? According to SPARC: (http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.shtml)

• The author is the copyright holder. As the author of a work you are the copyright holder unless and until you transfer the copyright to someone else in a signed agreement.
• Assigning your rights matters. Normally, the copyright holder possesses the exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, and modification of the original work. An author who has transferred copyright without retaining these rights must ask permission unless the use is one of the statutory exemptions in copyright law.
• The copyright holder controls the work. Decisions concerning use of the work, such as distribution, access, pricing, updates, and any use restrictions belong to the copyright holder. Authors who have transferred their copyright without retaining any rights may not be able to place the work on course Web sites, copy it for students or colleagues, deposit the work in a public online archive, or reuse portions in a subsequent work. That’s why it is important to retain the rights you need.
• Transferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing. The law allows you to transfer copyright while holding back rights for yourself and others. This is the compromise that the SPARC Author Addendum helps you to achieve.

Suber (2011) mentioned different kinds of OA, and I tried to find out what they mean. Different kind of OA: (http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22617/)  

Gratis OA vs. Libre OA: Gratis OA is free online access to refereed journal articles. Libre OA is free online access to refereed journal articles plus certain further re-use and re-publication rights. (Gratis – free to read; Gratis – free to use)  
Green OA vs. Gold OA: Green OA is Gratis OA to the author's final refereed drafts of all refereed journal articles, provided through author self-archiving of all refereed journal articles. Gold OA is (2b) Gratis or Libre OA to articles published in OA journals.

Also see the Table of OA from Peter Suber (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/08/greengold-oa-and-gratislibre-oa.html) I wanted to shared the summary that I gathered because as a person who did not have prior knowledge of OA and the OA copyright, it helped me understanding the important OA terminologies and how we can use them.

*Fair use is the right of the public to make reasonable use of copyrighted material in special circumstances without the Copyright Owner's Permission. The United States Copyright Act recognizes that fair use of a copyrighted work may be used "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research."
Factors to be considered include (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is for a commercial purpose or is for non-profit educational purposes; (2) what kind of work is the copyrighted work (for instance, is it creative or factual); (3) the amount and importance of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential commercial market for or value of the copyrighted work. Whether or not a fair use has been made of a copyrighted work is not always easy to determine and there have been many lawsuits to determine whether or not a use is "fair." Where there is doubt about whether something qualifies for the fair use exception, you should request a License from the Copyright Holder. (http://www.copyrightkids.org/definitions.html#fairuse)  

*Public Domain: Works that are in the public domain belong to everyone and can be freely used without compensating the authors. There are many reasons why a work may be in the public domain. For example, works consisting entirely of information that is commonly available and that contain no original authorship are in the public domain. Works that previously were entitled to copyright protection enter the public domain when the Term of the copyright has expired. Under the 1909 Copyright Act, if a work was published without a Copyright Notice, protection was lost and the work entered the public domain when it was first Published. (http://www.copyrightkids.org/definitions.html#publicdomain)


References:

• Suber, P. (2011). Welcome to the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #159 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-11.htm