Business, Innovation and Skills CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Dr Dan Stowell
1. My name is Dr Dan Stowell and I am a postdoctoral researcher, based in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University London (QMUL). My research group is widely held to be the leading UK group working on signal processing and machine learning for music. Our research is primarily funded by EPSRC and the EU, with other support coming from other research councils, the Royal Academy of Engineering and private donors.
2. I am writing in a personal capacity, as an early-career researcher for whom decisions about where and how to publish are extremely important. For someone in my position, getting my published work to the right audiences is crucial to my career prospects.
3. It appears that there has been a concerted campaign against the CC-BY licence, by journal editors, publishers, and professors in research fields where the transition to open-access is only just beginning (and so some nervousness is understandable). These people have, knowingly or not, promoted some slurs and misconceptions about open access and CC licenses. In some cases this may be motivated by self-interest, but in many cases I’m sure it is just fear of the new in this transition, which is understandable. I am concerned, however, that these misunderstandings may influence policy.
4. Some commentators have talked about CC-BY licensing as undermining intellectual property. A letter from six academics to the London Review of Books claimed that CC-BY “would seriously undermine the integrity of the work scholars produce”. However, such licensing has been used productively for many millions of scientific research outputs. The benefits of this explicit common licensing are just beginning to show, raising all boats as researchers such as myself are able not only to access, but also to make use of, the publicly-funded work of others. I have published my own work under various CC licences and seen the benefits come back in citations, reuses and collaborations. Some commentators claim that CC-BY’s requirement of “attribution” is an obscure fig-leaf; however, it’s almost identical with the long-standing academic practice of citing your sources, which is well understood in all fields.
5. My personal preference is for CC-BY-SA rather than CC-BY, because the “share alike” principle encourages reciprocity. I think this reciprocity would help to settle some concerns about reuse of work, but on the other hand I recognise that “share alike” principles can be quite intimidating to older academics who aren’t familiar with the benefits. During this transition period, I would advocate that academics should be allowed to choose freely between gold (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA) or green open access, and that RCUK should not prefer one over the other.
6. A separate aspect of the current plan is the centralisation of publication budgets, from researchers to central university funds. This seems very likely to introduce unproductive competition between researchers within each university, especially if gold OA is to be preferred over green, and I cannot see any reason why publication budgets for APCs should not spread across research project budgets as well as centrally.
Recommendations for Action:
1. The BIS committee should resist the attempts by vested interests to muddy the issue of CC-BY licensing, and recognise that it has been deployed productively for millions of research outputs.
2. RCUK should allow authors to choose freely between gold (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA) or green open access.
3. Publication budgets should not be forced to be centralised within universities. Funding to support APCs will be essential in the coming years, and can be allocated as part of research grants.
31 January 2013