Category: Copyright

Let’s cultivate copyright confidence

Copyright competency is about more than knowing the rules. It’s about knowing what the rules are trying to achieve and how libraries contribute to those goals.

If you have a legally inclined librarian in your life, you may have heard them lament the state of copyright education in MLIS programs. If not, then allow me. Several studies have highlighted the widespread lack of sufficient copyright education across MLIS programs, both in North America and abroad (Cross & Edwards, 2011; Dryden, 2010; Fernández-Molina et al., 2022; Gathegi & Burke, 2008; Schmidt & English, 2015). These studies also point out that, even in the LIS programs that do offer some form of copyright-focused course, many are elective as opposed to a requirement for matriculation; few of the courses are “rigorous” or are regularly updated alongside the evolving copyright environment (Kawooya et al., 2019); and ultimately, “very few courses at the master’s level provide for the minimal requirements in terms of copyright literacy for professionals —whether to carry out their own tasks and functions, or else to aid co-workers or users as effectively as possible” (Fernández-Molina et al., 2022, p. 6). In a 2014 survey, only 49% of academic librarians felt prepared to provide copyright support to library patrons (Charbonneau & Priehs, 2014), and those librarians—along with library deans (Eye, 2013)—expressed a desire for additional copyright training. I’d guess the results would be similar in 2026. My MLIS program did offer a copyright-focused course and I still needed several copyright professional development courses to feel competent.

Copyright competency is about more than knowing and following (and often over-complying with) the rules. It’s about knowing why the rules exist—what goals the law is trying to accomplish so as to benefit society, and how the current legal framework is or is not helping society reach those goals. Libraries can locate their contributions to these larger societal goals and thereby understand why and how copyright law allows us to do what we do. And we can often do more than we might think (e.g. thank you, fair use).

On the other side of the coin, copyright law can also restrict libraries from being able to do what they should be able to do. Contractual override of library exceptions and fair use rights, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act’s restrictive amendments to library copyright exceptions (17 U.S. Code § 108 b(2) and c(2)), and the Second Circuit’s unfortunate decision in the Internet Archive case on controlled digital lending are just a few examples of a tightening belt on libraries and our mission of sharing information for the public good. Libraries (read: librarians) need to know how to make their own case. We contribute in unique ways to the societal goals copyright is trying to accomplish. Yet, in conversations with copyright experts, I’ve heard this sentiment shared several times: “If someone proposed the idea of libraries today, they’d be laughed out of the room.” I don’t think they’re wrong.

So, yes, we need to pay more attention to copyright in MLIS programs. We need ongoing professional development about copyright as it evolves. We need to feel more prepared to inform folks about how copyright affects their work (for example, authors’ propensity to sign away their journal article copyrights with abandon is the “original sin” of the serials crisis). Fortunately, there are very smart people and organizations working hard in this arena. I’m sharing a few of my favorite resources here, in hopes that they help someone take a step toward more copyright confidence:

Quick Reference Resources

  • All things from Authors Alliance: Super reliable advisors on all things copyright, specializing in issues affecting higher ed and in support of authors “who want to serve the public good by sharing their creations broadly.” Along with their public-facing news, analysis, and updates about copyright, they also work directly with academic libraries, if you know of an interested dean.
  • Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OER: An explanation of how fair use allows authors to reference/include content/diagrams from other works in new noncommercial texts (even if those other works are all-rights-reserved). Generally helpful examples of how fair use can be applied to authorship
  • Fair Use Fundamentals from Fair Use Week: A tidy and LibGuide-friendly infographic on how fair use supports the fundamental purpose of copyright and makes possible lots of uses we rely on every day. Also, consider celebrating Fair Use Week in February!
  • Steps in the Analysis of a U.S. Copyright Case (Enriquez, 2013): Even though the risk of legal action and legal penalty is quite low for academic libraries, for those who want to understand all possible outcomes of their copyright-related actions, this document is a simple overview of court procedures for copyright infringement cases.

Professional Development

  • Creative Commons Certificate Curriculum: The ultimate authority on how CC licenses work. This certificate program is great, and in the spirit of open sharing, CC also makes their curriculum materials publicly available.
  • Open Copyright Education Advisory Network (OCEAN): OCEAN is carrying forth the mantel of regular copyright professional development for cultural heritage institutions. Not copyright 101, but if you have a baseline understanding, their events are great.

…so what exactly is going on between publishers and the NIH?

We’ve reached an important historical inflection point in the funder/author/publisher triangular relationship.

Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash

Background

If you work at a university, you’re likely aware of the current presidential administration’s dramatic mandates to federal agencies that fund research, most infamously requiring them to cancel thousands of active grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and attempting to significantly decrease indirect costs paid to universities for overseeing federal grant compliance.

Interestingly, however, the current administration and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Michael Kratsios have given no indication that they will backtrack mandates laid out by the previous administration’s Nelson Memo, which advised federal funders that grant recipients should make their funded research outputs publicly available without an embargo period (among other things). The goal of the Nelson Memo was to “…promote the rapid sharing of federally funded research data with appropriate protections and accountability measures [that] will allow for greater validity of research results and more equitable access to data resources,” along with the rationale that “There should be no delay between taxpayers and the returns on their investments in research.” This memo was widely seen as a major win in the open knowledge community, and also apparently meets the approval of the current presidential administration and their appointees (more on that below).

For those unfamiliar, publishers of scholarly journals often require authors to agree to an embargo period, which means no version of their article may be made publicly available on any other platform for a certain amount of time (usually 6 to 24 months depending on the journal). This allows publishers to profit from subscription-only access to new research during its period of highest readership. After the embargo period, publishers have generally allowed authors to make available the “author’s accepted version” of the article (the version after peer review but before publisher copyediting and typesetting) in a funder’s repository, institutional repository, or disciplinary repository. The practice of sharing items openly in this way is often referred to as “self-archiving” or “green open access.” It is also very common for journals to offer a pay-for-open model, through which authors can pay an article processing charge (APC) to apply a Creative Commons license to their article instead of transferring all rights to the publisher. This is often referred to as “gold open access.” Federal funders have typically allowed authors to use grant funds for APCs.

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has long required grant recipients to deposit copies of grant-funded articles in their openly accessible PubMed Central repository, but until this year, the NIH allowed publishers to retain sole distribution rights for a 12-month embargo period if authors chose not to pay for open access. In turn, many publishers have offered authors the service of depositing the appropriate article version in PubMed Central on their behalf after the embargo period ends.

Showdown

Last year, in compliance with the Nelson Memo, the NIH announced an updated Public Access Policy, originally slated to take effect on December 31, 2025. On April 30, newly appointed NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya announced a 6-month acceleration of the policy’s effective date, to begin on July 1. The new policy “…requires Author Accepted Manuscripts accepted for publication in a journal, on or after July 1, 2025, to be submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication, for public availability without embargo upon the Official Date of Publication.” Unsurprisingly, it seems several of the largest publishers are not happy about this new public access policy.

As an early career librarian trying to parse this complicated, evolving situation, I’ve relied heavily on my professional communities. Conversations on the University Information & Policy Officers listserv have been really helpful for my understanding. Jeremy York, Assistant Director of the Copyright Office at University of Michigan Library, kindly granted me permission to quote his summary of publisher reactions.

“Publishers are responding to the new policy in different ways. Some publishers, like Wiley and Springer Nature will no longer deposit works in PubMed Central on behalf of authors unless authors pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) to make the work available under an open license. They also are not allowing deposit by the author of the author accepted manuscript (AAM) in PubMed Central and see the pursuit of this ‘green open access’ route by authors as a violation of their publishing agreement.

The American Chemical Society (ACS), on the other hand, has implemented an Author Development Charge (ADC). If authors do not pay the APC to have their work published with an open license, they can still pay the ADC to be able to deposit the author accepted manuscript (AAM) in PubMed Central to comply with NIH’s policy.[1] If authors deposit the AAM in PubMed Central without paying the ADC, ACS sees this as a violation of the publishing agreement.”

The complicating factor here is that the NIH’s claims over funded research outputs predate any author’s agreement with a publisher. The NIH is simply exercising a right that all federal funders have held for a long time, called the Federal Purpose License. In the NIH’s case, their version of federal purpose license states grant recipients “…may copyright any work that is subject to copyright and was developed, or for which ownership was acquired, under a Federal award. The HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] awarding agency reserves a royalty-free, nonexclusive and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work for Federal purposes, and to authorize others to do so.”

In response, certain publishers are advising authors that the only way to comply with both a) the NIH public access policy and b) their journals’ copyright agreements is to pay some sort of fee. They are signaling an unwillingness to publish paywalled articles that will be made publicly accessible on another platform; if a preexisting claim to an article exists, then publishers may simply choose not to publish that article despite acceptance by an editorial board, unless the author pays a fee.

Yet, the purpose behind federal funders’ public access policies is not to force authors to pay for open access, as evidenced by the NIH’s announcement on July 8, which revealed plans to cap the amount of NIH-funded dollars that authors can spend to make articles open access (or in other words, cap the amount authors can spend on APCs) beginning in 2026.[2] Clearly, the NIH does not want to pay exorbitantly for articles it already holds rights over via the federal purpose license.

Breakdown

This is an important historical inflection point in the funder/author/publisher triangular relationship, in part because the NIH awarded over $26 billion across 41,304 research project grants in 2024, up from $22 billion in 2019 (although those numbers may deteriorate going forward given the current presidential administration’s proposed budget). Needless to say, federal funding is integral to the United States’ research infrastructure, meaning federal funders possess a lot of leverage to shift that infrastructure. What happens over the coming months as other federal funders’ public access policies take effect may significantly alter available open access publishing pathways for scholarly authors and influence subscription negotiations for libraries.

For interpretations of what this ongoing situation means for authors and advice about how to navigate the publication process as a grant recipient, I recommend Authors Alliance, who put together this excellent FAQ page [and update here] on the current “contradictory policy environment,” and are co-hosting a webcast on August 5, 2025 focused on new federal funder sharing requirements.

For academic libraries, one likely outcome in the immediate future is increased traffic on existing read-and-publish deals and increased pressure to engage in new and/or bigger read-and-publish deals from research faculty.[3] However, many academic libraries receive some portion of indirect costs paid by federal funders to universities for grant oversight, so any budget squeeze due to the White House’s proposed cap on indirect costs would make it difficult for those libraries to invest in new or more expensive read-and-publish deals.

On the other hand, if both publishers and federal funders were to hold firm in their current standoff, public access policies and publication fee caps could gradually redirect authors away from pay-for-open publishing models and toward outlets that allow for self-archiving or use a free-to-read, free-to-publish model (sometimes referred to as “diamond open access”). Big for-profit publishers are relying on their journals’ prestige and importance in tenure portfolios to withstand these shifting sands, but if the cost of publishing in their journals remains unaffordable for authors, readership and tenure committees could begin to elevate free or affordable open access journals in their place. Many such alternative outlets exist; for journals with zero-embargo deposits, you can check JISC open policy finder, and diamond open access journals are easily found on the Directory of Open Access Journals by selecting the “without fees” filter. It is worth noting that, among the big publishers, Sage stands apart by providing a relatively generous zero-embargo self-archiving policy.

A world in which libraries regain some financial relief from big publishers, and in which more people can benefit from openly accessible research findings, is one we should hope for. The actual outcome of this standoff is impossible to predict but is certainly worth monitoring for academic librarians.

[1] Several smart folks, including Authors Alliance, have doubts about whether authors will be allowed to use NIH grant funding to pay for an ADC. From Jeremy York’s summary: “The NIH guidance states that ‘Costs for publishing services that are charged differentially because an Author Accepted Manuscript is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy or the work is the result of NIH funding are unallowable because charges must be levied impartially on all items published by the journal, whether or not under a federal award’ (GPS 7.9.1).”

[2] The announcement did not indicate an effective date or exact cap amount.

[3] For those unfamiliar, read-and-publish deals (sometimes referred to as “transformative agreements”) between libraries and publishers provide a mechanism for an institutions’ authors to publish through an open access pathway without themselves paying APCs. Instead, the institution can draw from a pool of funds or credits to cover the APC on behalf of the author. This open access mechanism is part of the library’s subscription to the publisher’s journal portfolio. Aside from libraries shouldering massive subscription costs, the main drawback of read-and-publish deals are that libraries are often subscribing to journal access as opposed to purchasing perpetual access for that year’s journal issues. This move toward conditional access and away from ownership creates an increasingly difficult situation for libraries to extract themselves from, lest they lose access to journal backlogs from the years they subscribed instead of purchased.

Generative AI & the Evolution of Academic Librarianship

During my first week as an academic librarian, many faculty discussions on campus were regarding the issue of generative AI software, such as ChatGPT. A majority of the faculty at a panel discussion held on campus about AI expressed concerns over plagiarism, copyright, academic integrity, etc. Those on the panel, however, commented on how beneficial using AI was. When asked more specifically on what faculty should do to combat potential cheating from using generative AI, the panel seemed in agreeance on an answer: educate your students on how to responsibly use AI.

I will admit; prior to starting my career as an academic librarian, I had never used generative AI. Of course, I saw generative AI blasted all over the news and saw updates on sites and apps like Snapchat, but I never understood what generative AI was. I did not have any interest in learning about it either. After attending the panel discussion, however, I was reminded of a book I read called Who Moved My Cheese? by Dr. Spencer Johnson. I was assigned to read Who Moved My Cheese? by a professor in graduate school and often refer back to it (I highly recommend reading it if you have not already done so). The book explains how change can happen unexpectedly, and when it does, it is better to adapt and move forward than be left behind. Feeling like I was being left behind while other faculty embraced generative AI, I decided to learn as much as I could about it.

Although I read numerous articles and watched hours of YouTube videos, I was still confused as to how generative AI worked. Near the end of August, my dean notified the library faculty of a course offered through ALA’s eLearning platform. The course was titled Exploring AI with Critical Information Literacy and taught by Sarah Morris. I enrolled in the course and learned about the development and usage of generative AI and machine learning, current discussions around AI, opportunities and challenges for AI usage in higher education, and how to engage AI as an academic librarian. Throughout the course, we examined AI through a critical lens and discussed strategies for AI to be incorporated at our own institutions. I enjoyed the course and found the lesson on prompt engineering to be the most intriguing.

One of the ways in which academic librarians can enter the generative AI realm in higher education is through teaching faculty and students prompt engineering. Prompt engineering is strategizing your generative AI input to obtain your desired output. While one can simply ask ChatGPT a standard question, prompt engineering recommends telling ChatGPT through what lens to answer the question. For example, if I was wondering how to craft a lesson for my class on implicit bias, I could plainly input:

“What lesson on implicit bias could I give my college class?”

Using prompt engineering, a better input would be:

“Act like an Academic Librarian teaching a college course on critical thinking. Design a lesson about implicit bias. Include topics for the class to discuss in small groups.”

While the results appeared similar, the detailed prompt elicited a result more applicable to my course by covering topics such as bias in information sources and media literacy.

Another way academic librarians can educate faculty and students on generative AI is on responsible use. More specifically, we can create lessons and workshops around copyright, academic integrity, and the reliability of the output. I tried this with my critical thinking class. I first introduced the university’s academic integrity policy, including definitions of cheating and plagiarism. Because the majority of my class was unfamiliar with generative AI, I briefly explained how generative AI worked. Afterwards, I had the students discuss the potential benefits and challenges of using generative AI. Using my personal account (my university does not support the use of ChatGPT), I asked ChatGPT and had the students read the output. I stressed that when used responsibly, ChatGPT can be a great resource for brainstorming; however, I cautioned my students from using it for writing assignments due to plagiarism, copyright infringement, and incorrect information. To illustrate this point further, I informed my students of the two attorneys in New York who acquired case law through ChatGPT. The attorneys did not fact-check the case law, and the judge discovered that the case law actually did not exist. The cases ChatGPT cited were made up. Overall, the lesson was a success. Many students chose to explore generative AI in more depth for the final projects.

By embracing generative AI, academic librarians can increase their skillset and become a useful resource for faculty and students navigating the rapidly evolving world of AI. It will be interesting to learn about how varying universities respond, if they have not done so already. I imagine we will see new policies implemented on campus, positions established, and roles altered.

“Wait a minute Honey, I’m gonna add it up:” Kanopies, DRM, and the Permanence of the Collection

In my new position at the University of Washington I have a long commute, as one would expect, in a large city like Seattle. On this commute I listen to music and read and on the bus last week I reached for an old Midwestern standby, The Violent Femmes only to find that their first album, Violent Femmes (1983) had been removed from streaming platforms and, despite my purchase of the album electronically, had been removed from iTunes for me to listen to. (Reader, don’t worry many of the songs are available on their greatest hits record, aptly titled, Permanent Record.)

The Violent Femmes performing in 2006 (Wikimedia Commons)

In the last few weeks librarians have been confronted in various ways with the difficulties surrounding streaming and licensed materials. Kanopy, one of the largest and most popular streaming services available for library users, was recently and publicly dropped by the New York Public Library (NYPL). How we found this news out, and how it became well known, was a result of Kanopy sending an email to NYPL users who had registered for the service prior to NYPL’s own statement on the issue. In part, their message explained “The New York, Queens, and Brooklyn Public Libraries have decided to discontinue Kanopy’s film streaming service to its patrons…Film as a public resource is a critical part of New York’s culture and communities. We have enjoyed furthering the New York City Libraries’ mission of providing open access to knowledge… [emphasis mine].” 

Kanopy's Letter to Patrons
The Kanopy Letter sent to New York Public Library Patrons

Setting aside for a moment the frankly gross overstep of a vendor directly reaching out to library patrons about library budgetary or mission changes, let’s focus in on the language that Kanopy uses to describe their service: public resource and open access. For those of us who work in academic libraries and have dealt with the ongoing difficulties with providing access to streaming media for our communities, and especially those who are aware of Kanopy’s expensive nature, these kinds of words might make us take a pause.

As a cinema librarian I can say that film is an important part of cultural legacy and should be a public resource and that access to film should be part of any library’s collection mission. Yet, for many of us the way we consume and purchase media has dramatically changed in the past decade, as streaming and licensing digital files have become the norm for the majority of consumers. Kanopy fits into this very nicely. It’s interface looks remarkably similar to any other streaming platform, and invites users to click through its offerings like they would for Netflix, Criterion Channel, and Amazon Prime. It’s hidden cost, as we know, only triggers when a user clicks on a film and watches a certain amount of it. For users it seems free; like the offerings from Netflix that despite the monthly cost allows users to peruse and sample any film in the catalog. For the most part this is how streaming platforms like Kanopy have advertised themselves to our users.


I want to be clear that it is not my intention to pile on to Kanopy, because I truly believe that Kanopy provides a great service for spreading art and indie film to the widest audience. Rather I want us to think about how we are building collections and gathering materials in this new digital age of instant gratification and expectations.

Over the last year and especially in the wake of NYPL’s decision, I have seen many articles touting and promoting the great new “free” hidden service provided by the library. This article from Entertainment Weekly https://ew.com/movies/2019/01/18/free-streaming-service-kanopy/ emphasizes the accessibility and the free cost as these pillars of why Kanopy is amazing for users. And Kanopy for their part makes a pretty compelling case for this kind of access  CEO Olivia Humphrey states “‘We have such a wide audience,’ says Humphrey. ‘We have people who can’t afford an internet connection that go down to the local public library to watch…. That’s a really important demographic for us, [as much as] cinephiles in L.A. and New York.’ Part of serving that audience is finding what Humphrey calls “content gaps” in other streaming platforms and trying to fill the void” This is something that I think is a really wonderful part of Kanopy, is that it allows access to art and indie film through public libraries but at what cost?

Well…we often don’t know what the cost is. The model is certainly different at Academic institutions but one of the cited figures for public libraries is $2 a watch for each film, and some libraries have limited how often users can watch films a month in order to keep these figures down (
https://www.indiewire.com/2019/06/new-york-public-library-drops-kanopy-netflix-alternative-too-expensive-1202153550/ ) . For Academic institutions, Kanopy, and other services like it, are fairly reminiscent of our licensing agreements with our ebooks, and costs can be astronomical. In a Film Quarterly article critiquing the “freeness” of Kanopy, Chris Cagel, a film historian at Temple University, writes “Instead, Kanopy’s platform drives “patron-driven acquisition” in which three viewings (defined as 30 seconds or more of a title) trigger a library license fee per title. (The figures I’ve seen are $150 for a year, $350 for a 3-year license, though the price might vary or change over time.) (see: https://filmquarterly.org/2019/05/03/kanopy-not-just-like-netflix-and-not-free/ )” These costs can quickly go out of control for many libraries, and the larger the population and the more articles about how this “free service” is provided by libraries, complicate this matter. It leads us to the moment where we are forced to cancel subscriptions because our patrons are using it, rather than how we often weed in our collections based on lack of use or usefulness in a general sense.


…the larger expectation for our library within the community is that we are permanent repositories for information (see the issues we generally see when library’s weed their collections) digital media is anything but permanent, and we have to reconcile this fact with our user expectations.

I want to be clear that it is not my intention to pile on to Kanopy, because I truly believe that Kanopy provides a great service for spreading art and indie film to the widest audience. Rather I want us to think about how we are building collections and gathering materials in this new digital age of instant gratification and expectations and how we tell that story to our users. Our users will start to feel the loss of licenses when materials start to leave our collections, just as they are starting to see their own digital materials lost in their personal collections. On the same day that Kanopy and NYPL parted ways it was reported that ebooks purchased through the Microsoft Store would be deleted this month from those who had purchased them. https://gizmodo.com/ebooks-purchased-from-microsoft-will-be-deleted-this-mo-1836005672

Digital items with DRM (digital rights management) are never fully owned, instead they are licensed. You can read more about DRM from the grassroots anti-DRM movement Defective By Design. They even wrote an open letter to libraries https://www.defectivebydesign.org/LetterToLibraries. These objects can be locked to prevent sharing of the material to other users and they can be taken away, like the ebooks or like my precious Violent Femmes album. My institution is well off enough to encourage our subject liaisons to purchase ebooks without DRM (which increases the costs substantially), but many public libraries or smaller academic libraries cannot afford to pay an extra $150 to make sure digital items are the community’s to keep. But the larger expectation for our library within the community is that we are permanent repositories for information (see the issues we generally see when library’s weed their collections) digital media is anything but permanent, and we have to reconcile this fact with our user expectations.

In my own life I have begun collecting materials for myself in non-digital form. This means that I have spent money buying twenty-year-old video games, hard to find DVDs, and vinyl because I am aware of the tenuous grip that we have on our digital files and media. It is essential that libraries work to make our communities aware of the restrictions and the fugitive nature of digital licensed materials and platforms and work with our users to ensure their needs are met in this changing time. NYPL for their part explained their decision to move away from Kanopy stating that “The Library made this decision after a careful and thorough examination of its streaming offerings and priorities. We believe the cost of Kanopy makes it unsustainable for the Library, and that our resources are better utilized purchasing more in-demand collections such as books and e-books (https://www.nypl.org/press/press-release/june-24-2019/statement-about-kanopy) 

For a city of 8 million people, Kanopy was perhaps unsustainable, but NYPL is also making a point about how they see their collections growing and that is in books and ebooks. For libraries providing for the public good means making these kinds of decisions, and we need helpful partnerships with our vendors to provide this access. While I do not know what was going on in the minds of the directors of NYPL, it sure does not seem like the library system was wanting to wage this battle in the open prior to Kanopy’s patron email. Yet, this has become a moment where librarians can have conversations with patrons about the costs and limitations of streaming and digital materials. I, for one, have received several messages from my faculty colleagues about how the NYPL decision impacts us at the University of Washington, and I tell them that while it won’t change the way we interact with Kanopy (that decision was made long before I came here) but that this is an important teaching moment in our current climate. While the vendor spurred this conversation, I believe that libraries can have an important voice to share in this new media age.

Open Access and the Benevolence of Multinational Corporations

As with much of its history the academic library is at a crossroads. The exploding budgets for journal subscriptions which are necessary to the living and breathing research institution is slowly strangling libraries. This, of course, is obvious and much maligned and talked about. Getting back to the perceived roots of librarianship and the values of intellectual and learning freedom is an increase in open access publishing and learning in the minds of our left-leaning colleagues. The narrative has been pretty simple; open access moves the dissemination of information away from large corporate publishers and into the hands of “radical” faculty members who use their clout and expertise to provide information for the masses.

Gold open access (journals which publish fully open with little or no strings attached) is hardly the norm, and is outpaced in all metrics by Green open access (the self-archiving of pre or post print versions from non-open access journals). Gargouri, Larivière, Gingras, Carr, and Harnad (2010) found that unsurprisingly that subscription-based journals dominated STEM fields for publications, and only about 21% of their articles were available by green open access means. At the time of their study, only ~3% of publications were fully open access, evidence suggests this number has grown but not by much. While this number has surely grown in many fields, currently OA is dominated by Green and the dreaded hybrid journals.

Oftentimes, green OA is only possible with copyright strings that make it difficult for scholars to keep straight the versions, the citations, and the identifiers necessary to comply with author’s agreements. The burden is on the scholar to provide the necessary versions to libraries or other disciplinary repositories for the green model to work. While this can be seen as an open path set forth by the publishers, the hurdles and the arcane rules behind it makes the benevolence more of a blind eye. Some scholars I’ve spoken with do not want work viewed as “unfinished” or “unpolished” out on the internet, which is a far assumption to make. The “pre-print” especially because of its lack of peer-review and editing is very unappealing in some disciplines, while others, with long standing histories in open science have embraced it (looking at you Physics). On a practical side, how do we cite pre-prints and post-prints? I’m a librarian and I’m not actually sure the best action on that. When a journal owns the copyright on the very page numbers, how can I cite a passage I glean from an IR?

This has led me to often wonder whether green OA operates under the assumptions that overworked faculty and librarians will not follow through on the rules and therefore keep the article behind subscription walls.

The present and future of Open relies heavily on the benevolence of corporations to provide avenues for their content to be openly accessible. The success that libraries and scholars have had with green open access is limited by the rules set up by journals as well as the initiative of individual scholars. With many of the larger publishers showing anything from reluctance to open hostility to open access measures, this is a precarious proposition for libraries. Pressure from researchers and the past Presidential administration has made OA an important part of the scholarly communication environment yet we as researchers and as librarians are at the mercy of the large publishers to make this happen and need their partnerships and the continued patiences of our patrons to make this happen. Publishers, knowing the field’s love affair with open, have provided for open access in a pay-to-play model known as “hybrid.”

For many librarians, hybrid journals are seen as double dipping. Institutions are asked to provide extra money on top of growing subscription fees to make locked access articles fully open. APCs, the most common way to pay for these articles to be made open, range from a couple hundred dollars to upwards of $3000 depending on the field. For libraries chaffing under the threat of rising subscription fees this is not something many are willing to pay for no matter what our good intentions are to do. The elitist and competitive nature of publications and tenure requirements reinforce the need to publish in certain journals published expensively by certain publishers. The best journal in your field will allow you to have an open access version with rules that are complicated and impossible to understand or with the low price of several thousands of dollars make it gold open access for you. Wealthier scholars will soon pay the APC rather than jump through the hoops of green open access, if they know such a path even really exists.

What we are left with is a system that is built to perpetuate the subscription crises without any real and easy solution to full open accessibility. We either pay for subscriptions, pay for APCs, or pay for both. International and national boycotts, like the ones striking Western Europe  hurt the bottom line of publishers but harm faculty who need the journals to survive in this current scholarly climate. Pirate websites prey on our log in systems to provide “open” access to every published article but put our institutions, as well as researchers, at risk. While green avenues might be appealing, they are only the most common method of providing open access materials because of their inherently difficult nature. A journal wanting you to pay their hybrid fee would be happy to provide you with many hoops to jump through for a post-print. Relying on faculty to provide the correct versions is like relying on faculty respond to your Friday afternoon emails during the Summer; some will be pros at it but most will ignore you.

For now, we wait with baited breadth for the benevolence of publishers like the cave children who could be saved by Elon Musk’s submarine.