This week we’re posting about papers from AoB PLANTS, an open access journal for plant science, and launching in silico Plants, another open access journal for research between mathematics, computer science and plant biology. There’s also an option to publish papers with Open Access in Annals of Botany, but what does Open Access mean?

The Budapest declaration says: “By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

In the following years, things have got more complex.

Open Access papers are usually (but not always) released under a Creative Commons licence. The most basic licence is BY. This is part of all Creative Commons licences and means if you’re reproducing the work (or a part of it) you have to credit the original author. This licence can have some modifiers.

SA is Share-alike. This clause means if you release something with a BY-SA licence, then anyone publishing something that reuses your work should also release their work with a BY-SA licence. So if Marvel Studios decide to make their next film based on Botany One, they can – but they have to release it under a BY-SA licence too.

If you want to prevent commercial use altogether, you can add the NC, Non-commercial clause. Annals of Botany and AoBP Open Access licences used to be BY-NC. The reason for shifting is covered by Claire Redhead at the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. First of all non-commercial is a vague term. Any serious attempt to enforce it is going to involve a lot of expensive lawyers. Secondly, it limits the reuse of the material in some other venues.

https://twitter.com/Lophophanes/status/1022127427013804032

While Wikipedia has its faults, being able to add fact-based items to it is helpful. Last week I a ran a small poll, to see if people thought commercial re-use was necessary for a paper to be open access. The result 57% to 30% was no, with the remainder being undecided.

That willingness to label NC papers as OA does seem against the drift of publishers. It’s not just Annals and AoBP that use BY instead of BY-NC. The same is true of New Phytologist’s Open Access papers, and PLOS One has never had anything other than BY licences. Anyone planning to use papers in in silico Plants might also welcome that they’ll only be using a BY licence. But not everyone is focussed on reuse.

Matt Candeias of In Defense of Plants also left a comment.