In this blogpost, Richard Poynder suggests that the current state of the Open Access movement is in disarray. Primarily, he blames a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright by authors in particular, but also by librarians and publishers as well. Poynder contests the wisdom of OA advocates who argue that the only legitimate way to license OA work is by using a CC-BY or attribution-only Creative Commons licence. This license is the second-most liberal option of all Creative Commons licenses, requiring only that authors be attributed for their work. (The most liberal is CC-0, which does not require any attribution.) Poynder argues that CC-BY has been used against authors who do not understand the full implication of an attribution-only license. Poynder also criticizes librarians for bandwagoning on the OA movement by positioning themselves as scholarly communication or open scholarship experts, without the chops to back such status up. Such a heavy handed criticism of the librarian role in contemporary scholarly communication is rare and pointed, with Poynder calling librarians “the OA police” 3 times as well as “the copyright police” once.

Poynder also suggests that authors are duped into thinking they retain author rights when they hold on to copyright but also sign away ownership rights to commercial publishers via publishers’ own, often homebrew, exclusive rights ownership provisions. Overall, Poynder sheds light on a fundamental challenge of open access: the lack of continuity and understanding around rights ownership of open access material, which has, ironically, allowed for commercial publishers to not only maintain their highly profitable position in scholarly publishing, but, in some cases, to expand it.

Work cited
Poynder, Richard. 2017. ”Copyright: The Immoveable Barrier that Open Access Advocates Underestimated.” https://poynder.blogspot.com/2017/02/copyright-immoveable-barrier-that-open.html