Our colleague Jolene Cole has created a wonderful guide on traditional copyright law and the fair use provision. Please review it here.
There are two different degrees of open access: gratis and libre. The terms were coined by noted open access scholar and director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, Peter Suber, in 2008.
Gratis open access is used to describe content for which all price barriers have been removed. An article available in an open access journal, for example, is gratis.
Libre open access, on the other hand, is a term used to describe content for which all price barriers have been removed and for which some permission barriers have been removed. Another way to think about it would be to consider the example above, and article available in an OA journal. The article is free (you don't have to pay for access), but without explicit terms of use, one may not reuse it, sell it, remix it, etc. A libre OA article, then, is an article that is free of cost and has explicit terms of use, such as a creative commons license, attached.
In the diagram below, we see that all libre content is gratis, but not all gratis content is libre.
For libre content, permission barriers have been removed. Usually, this is done with a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization founded by Lawrence Lessig in 2001. It is devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for legal sharing. Creative Commons achieves this goal by providing copyright-licenses free of charge to the public. The licenses allow authors to communicate which copyrights they reserve, and which they release. It is important to note that Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright -- because copy rights are inherent once a work is fixed in a tangible form -- but are based on it.
Copyright for Academic Librarians and Professionals by 1665: Earliest academic journals published in Europe were the Journal des Savants and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
1960-1979: Commercial publishers begin acquiring journals previously published by non-profit academic societies.
1986-2005: The "Serials Crisis." The number of serials purchased increases an average of 1.9% per year while total expenditures on serials increases 7.6% per year. [1]
2013: five commercial publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, and Sage) account for 50% of articles published. [2]
Take for example a single journal -- the Journal of Fictitious Journals. The JFJ has 200 subscribers (libraries) in 1990. There is an annual subscription fee of $1,000. From these 200 subscribers, the publisher of the JFJ therefore makes $200,000 for 1990. If, in 1991, six subscribers cancel their subscription, and if there is a strong likelihood that no new subscriptions will come in, then the publisher will lose $6,000 in 1991, and each year following. To recover the lost income, the publisher raises the subscription price by 10% in 1991, now charging $1,100 per subscription. The number of subscribers after the first year is less (194), but the annual revenue is more ($213,400). As prices rise, more subscriptions are canceled, and the publisher charges more per subscription. By 2000, the rate of cancelations exceeded the ability of the publishers to raise prices, and this is referred to as the "serials crisis." [3]
"The Big Deal" was first introduced in 1996 by Academic Press as a way to ease the mounting crisis. The Big Deal, or journal bundling, consists of a set price for a specified number of years for a specified list of journals. For commercial publishers, the advantage of bundling journals is guaranteed revenues. For libraries, the advantage is that the price is predictable for an entire set of journals for a set period of time. A drawback for libraries is that individual journal subscriptions cannot be canceled. For consortia subscribing to journal bundles, this problem is exacerbated, as individual libraries are locked into subscriptions for the term of the agreement. [3]
Sources:
[1] Association of Research Libraries, ARL Statistics: 2004-2005. Washington D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 2006.
[2] Larivière, Vincent; Haustein, Stefanie; Mongeon, Philippe. "The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era." PLoS One 10 (2015).
[3] Regazzi, John. "Traditional Economics of Academic Publishing." In Scholarly Communications: A History from Content as King to Content as Kingmaker. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. pp. 167-180.
It is important to be prepared to answer questions about open access, particularly from faculty. Though the library encourages open access publishing, and strongly encourages faculty to deposit their scholarly work in the Knowledge Box, neither GSCU nor USG have opined either way. There is no institutional mandate to publish in open access journals or to deposit work in the Knowledge Box. Please see the sub-page OA@GCSU FAQ for typical questions you may encounter about open access from faculty.
Authors are granted exclusive rights as soon as their work is fixed in a tangible form. These rights are:
Traditionally, granting publishers the permission to copy, display, and distribute the work is necessary in order for publishers to act in their own capacity. Sometimes publishers also require the right to create derivative works and the right to transmit the work. Granting the publisher exclusive permissions means that no one, including the author, can reuse text, tables, or figures in other publications without first getting permission from the new copyright owner -- the publisher.
There are alternatives to transferring copyright to the publisher, however! If the author contract does not indicate that the author retains copyright ownership of the work, or the right to republish the work in an institutional repository, the author has several recourses:
1. Emend the author contract with an addendum. There are several author addendums out there, but by far the easiest to use is the SPARC Author Addendum.The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument authors can use to modify author agreements with non-open access journal publishers. It allows authors to select which individual rights out of the bundle of copyrights they want to keep. It is easy to use -- just fill out the form online, print it and attach to the author contract. Authors should be sure to note they have done this in their cover letter to their publisher.
2. Publish in an Open Access journal. The list of OA journals grows every day, and most are scholarly, peer-reviewed, and respected. To find an OA journal, browse the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Typically, OA journals use a Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows authors to set the rights they wish to retain and which they release.
For more information on copyright and author agreements, please see the guide Author Resources for Publishing and Scholarship.