[ Introduction from Mike. I’m on the OKFN’s open-access mailing list, where we’re currently embroiled in a rather tedious reiteration of the debate about the merits of the various open-access licences.

My thanks to Steve Wang for pointing out that The Paleontological Society (in the USA, not to be confused the UK’s Palaeontological Association) has a new open access policy. The highlights are: Positives It’s good to see this real step forwards, and a lot of people are going to be particularly pleased that both Gold and Green are on offer.

A while back, I submitted evidence to the House of Lords’ inquiry into Open Access — pointlessly, as it turns out, since they were too busy listening to the whining of publishers, and of misinformed traditionalist academics who hadn’t taken the trouble to learn about OA before making public statements about it. Today the Lords’ report [PDF version] is out, summarised here. And it’s a crushing disappointment.

Earlier today, Richard Van Noorden pointed out on Twitter that in this video, at about 5:40, the speaker says that “CC BY is essentially a viral licence”. I was surprised to say the least that the speaker — Sue Joshua, Director of Legal Affairs at John Wiley & Sons — would make such a basic mistake. I’d have expected a copyright lawyer to know what the term “viral licence” means. Hence this post.

Hot on the heels of the UK House of Lords’ inquiry into Open Access, the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee of the House of Commons has begun its own inquiry. This morning I submitted my own evidence. Here it is. [It’s not too late to make your own submission. It doesn’t have to be as long as this: just let the government know your attitude regarding the parts of the question that concern you most.

David writes: Dr Heinrich Hartman is a new colleague of mine, who, having been working in the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University, has just returned to Germany to start a new job in a leading semantic web research group, that of Steffan Staab at the Institute for Web Science and Technologies, University of Koblenz-Landau.

[Originally written as a comment on Martin Coward’s blog, but I thought the point was worth making as its own post.] Here’s my take on the widely used Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) in contrast to more restrictive CC licences such as the Non-Commercial variant (CC BY-NC). It may be true, as Martin suggests, that CC BY-NC is better for the author than CC BY. But authors are part of a community, and it’s unquestionably

We know that most academic journals and edited volumes ask authors to sign a copyright transfer agreement before proceeding with publication. When this is done, the publisher becomes the owner of the paper; the author may retain some rights according to the grace or otherwise of the publisher. Plenty of authors have rightly railed against this land-grab, which publishers have been quite unable to justify.

The best open-access publishers make their articles open from the get-go, and leave them that way forever. (That’s part of what makes them best.) But it’s not unusual to find articles which either start out free to access, then go behind a paywall; or that start out paywalled but are later released; or that live behind a paywall but peek out for a limited period. Let’s talk about these.

I hope it’s clear to anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while that I do try to be fair to Elsevier (and indeed to everyone). Although I’ve often had occasion to be critical of them, I’ve also been critical of Palaeontologia Electronica , PLOS and Royal Society publishing, among others; and I have praised Elsevier when they’ve done good things.