Foundations of Open Access: Scientific Dissemination, Rights Retention and New Copyright Law

Abstract

The open access movement has grown from strength to strength since it took an organized form in the early 2000s. As per the current reports, more than 2.5 billion open access licensed scientific articles are available on the internet, showing its popularity amongst scholars, institutions, and the public in general. These shifts are indicative of the disillusionment felt by the scientific community towards the current state of academic publishing, where commercial publishers appear to disproportionately profit from scholars’ intellectual creations even when publication costs have come down drastically as digitalisation continues to gain traction. Alternatives to traditional publication models are being explored to mitigate the unintended effects of emicians are now gravitating towards rights retention in their work by making use of publicly available licenses such as those provided by the Creative Commons. This enables them to share their work with the wider public, while at the same time retaining certain rights in the work with themselves. However, providing open access to works has brought to the surface various issues such as violation of author’s moral rights, facilitation of plagiarism and indirect commercialization of the open access ecosystem. This article explores the legal-philosophical foundations of open access by grounding it in the Kantian ideas of public and private use of reason. Through this lens, , this article argues that, for all its potential pitfalls, open access has the ability to delicately balance the interests of all involved stakeholders - including those of the publishers. Our proposition here is that reciprocal, bifurcated copyright arrangements, by the author with the publisher on one hand, and the public on the other through the use of CC-BY licenses.