Just a quick post today, to refute an incorrect idea about open access that has unfortunately been propagated from time to time. That is the idea that if (say) PLOS were acquired by a barrier-based publisher such as Taylor and Francis, then its papers could be hidden behind paywalls and effectively lost to the world. For example, in Glyn Moody’s article The Open Access Schism, Heather Morrison is quoted as follows:
A major concern about the current move towards CC-BY is that it might allow re-enclosure by companies [...] This is a scenario suggested by assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Ottawa Heather Morrison. As she explains, “There is nothing in the CC BY license that would stop a business from taking all of the works, with attribution, and selling them under a more restrictive license—not only a more restrictive CC-type license (STM’s license is a good indication of what could happen here), but even behind a paywall, then buying out the OA publisher and taking down the OA content.”
This is flatly incorrect.
Reputable open-access publishers not only publish papers on their own sites but also place them in third-party archives, precisely to guard against doomsday scenarios. If (say) PeerJ were made an offer they couldn’t refuse by Elsevier, then the new owners could certainly shut down the PeerJ site; but there’s nothing the could do about the copies of PeerJ articles on PubMed Central, in CLOCKSS and elsewhere. And of course everyone who already has copies of the articles would always be free to distribute them in any way, including posting complete archives on their own websites.
Let’s not accept this kind of scaremongering.
