
U of California policy extends free access to all articles by UC employees - benbreen
http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/10/groundbreaking-presidential-oa-policy-covers-all-employees/
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Amorymeltzer
I am a graduate student at UC Davis and a member of the GSA, and while I am
very glad this is and has been happening, I have a long-standing complaint:
These policies are not Open Access policies.

They facilitate and encourage open access and availability, but does not
require it; that is an Open Access Option, not Policy. This is essentially an
opt-out system (good!) but the opt-out waiver is very easy. We can all imagine
certain publishers demanding proof of an opt-out waiver before accepting a
paper. It's unclear to me how they deal with multiple authors differing on
opinion, or from different institutions, but those are thorny issues.

Additionally, users can choose from any CreativeCommons license. I love CC,
but CC-BY-NC-ND is VERY different from CC-BY. Both OA? Maybe, under a fairly
narrow definition of access; PLOS defines open access as "unrestricted access
and unrestricted reuse"[1], so to them this isn't OA.

It is a fine policy and a net-positive, but it's not an Open Access policy.

1: [https://www.plos.org/open-access/](https://www.plos.org/open-access/)

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jacobolus
> _I love CC, but CC-BY-NC-ND is VERY different from CC-BY. Both OA? Maybe,
> under a fairly narrow definition of access;_

CC-BY-NC-ND is just fine, and it seems entirely reasonable to call it “open
access”. _By far_ the most important thing the public can do with scientific
papers is read them.

Obviously it can sometimes be nice to allow translations to other languages,
interpretations in other media, bundling of collections of papers, reuse of
the figures in other people’s works, copy/pasting the text into Wikipedia, or
whatever.

But if folks need to get separate dispensation from the author/publisher for
such additional uses, I have no problem with that.

~~~
IanCal
It does meet the most basic requirement of being free to read. That's a huge
improvement.

I've no problem with BY, but NC and ND are quite restrictive. ND particularly
as the license says I can't "build upon" the material. What does that mean in
a scientific paper, I can't replicate your experiment? I can't create
improvements to your algorithm and publish a new paper?

~~~
Amorymeltzer
It's not that bad. Copyright covers the publication, in this case the written
paper, not the technique; that could be covered by a patent, but is unlikely.
For basic, wet-lab bench research, traditional copyright has for example
permitted replication forever - no issue there.

Code is a trickier issue, but generally no, you could not publish derivative
code. Not that you generally can under traditional copyright.

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mkehrt
I am confused by this. In CS, at least, on publication the ACM generally
receives the copyright to the paper, so I don't understand how any faculty or
students could actually change the terms of the license.

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ninguem2
Don't you post your papers on the arxiv? That's basically the same thing. You
put the paper in the UC eScholarship repository in addition to publishing it
as you normally would. If the publisher complains, then there will be a
problem. But they are already dealing with the arxiv without issues.

~~~
mkehrt
Not in CS, but there is a strong tradition of hosting copies on personal
websites. The ACM is generally pretty lax on that, but technically they own
the copyright.

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ajdlinux
According to the ACM copyright policy at
[http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Re...](http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Retained),
the transfer agreement states that the author retains the right to publish on
their home page and on an institutional repository.

~~~
tzs
There is also similar language in the licensing agreement used when authors
choose to exclusively license to ACM rather than transfer copyright to ACM
[1].

Under both agreements the author also has the right to publish, before peer
review commences, a copy of the submitted version to non-peer servers, which
would cover things like arXiv.org.

[1] [http://www.acm.org/publications/ACM-
PubLicenseAgreement.pdf](http://www.acm.org/publications/ACM-
PubLicenseAgreement.pdf)

