“The majority of the points made by LERU in its response to the initial announcement of the impending launch of Plan S have been addressed in the Implementation Plan, and this is welcome. LERU stressed that the original goal of full transition to Open Access by 1 January 2020, from the point of view of logistics, was impossible. The Implementation Plan acknowledges this and now sees implementation as beginning on 1 January 2020. The wider context of Open Access is also addressed in the Implementation Plan. Signatories of Plan S will sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and implement its stipulations. Similarly, the Implementation Plan recognizes the calls made by LERU and others to be more explicit about the role of Green Open Access repositories in the transition to full Open Access (OA)….”
Category Archives: oa.pubass
Chris Hartgerink’s open letter to the CEO and Directors of STM
“The matter that is primarily on my mind is that of the Public Domain. Copyright legislation is quite messy due to the various legislative changes that have happened in the last century, as I am sure you are aware. This potentially makes it difficult to pinpoint which works are copyrighted and for which works copyright has expired. Nonetheless, copyright on some works has clearly expired. Examples of such works are those that predate the Berne convention by several decades and whose copyright expired after approximately thirty years depending on the legislative area. This would mean that most works before 1850 are clearly in the Public Domain. I was surprised that there are still many works whose copyright has expired but are still available under your member publishers with an explicit assertion of copyright (e.g., Elsevier; I focused on scholarly publishers). An example is an index page from 1823 that is being sold for $35.95 [1]. I find this sort of behavior quite bewildering, and a touch ironic, given that Elsevier and others have a particularly strong stance when it comes to enforcing their own copyright, as emphasized in the ongoing legal battle against Sci-Hub and LibGen. My questions are thus as follows: 1. Do you condone or condemn illicit claims of copyright by your member organizations? 2. Do you view the asserted copyright as in [1] and [2] valid? 3. Do you believe it is ethically responsible to sell scholarly works whose copyright has expired at the same price as new, copyrighted scholarly works? 4. Is it your intention to put the works, whose copyright has expired, truly in the Public Domain to accord with your mission statement of “creating and supporting the means for disseminating this knowledge”? 5. What steps will STM take to avoid this sort of mis-claim of copyright in the future, if it believes it to be incorrect? …”
False claims of copyright and STM | Chris H.J. Hartgerink’s Notebook
“Recently, I have become interested in the issue of false claims of copyright (i.e., copyfraud) in publishing. I just wrote to the publisher’s association (STM) to ask them what their perspective is on copyfraud is and whether they condone such behavior by their member associations. Read my letter here. I will update this blog when I get a response….”
Hindawi’s Decision to Leave the STM Association | About Hindawi
“After ten years of membership in the International Association of STM Publishers, Hindawi has made the difficult decision to terminate its membership in the association. This decision has come as a result of STM’s overwhelming focus on protecting business models of the past, rather than facilitating new models that Hindawi believes are both inevitable and necessary in order for scholarly publishers to continue contributing towards the dissemination of scholarly research in the years to come.
Hindawi will continue engaging with the STM Association in the hopes that it can embrace the challenge of tackling the obstacles that stand in the way of a transition to Open Access. If and when that happens, Hindawi will happily seek to reestablish its membership in the association. Until then we no longer believe that we can continue our membership in good conscience.”