PERSPECTIVE
Creative Commons and the Openness of Open Access
permit but to encourage, such as and BioMed Central, recommend- various creators of the online
translation into other languages. ed by the Open Access Scholarly educational materials in the Uni-
Creative Commons is an organi- Publishers Association, and ad- versity of Michigan Medical
zation that has responded by opted by the World Bank for its School s Open Michigan data-
producing a suite of six copyright internally published research. base have adopted nearly the full
licenses that offer standardized Commercial science publishers that suite of Creative Commons li-
terms of sharing to permit a have launched publications funded censes.4 The broad adoption of
range of uses beyond fair use, by article-processing charges also these licenses reflects a belief
subject to certain conditions.3 use Creative Commons licenses, that a work is not  open until
The four conditions are com- but they either use a more re- it s freely accessible on the Inter-
bined into six permutations re- strictive license or offer authors net and under a public license
flecting the types of copyright choices. The Nature Publishing offering more liberal terms of
restrictions that people who oth- Group s Scientific Reports, for ex- use than copyright law provides.
erwise choose to share their ample, allows authors to choose Though options offered by Cre-
works for free might like to re- from three Creative Commons li- ative Commons licenses address
tain (see table). The licenses, de- censes, including the Attribution the needs of copyright owners
signed to allow all uses except license. in various contexts, in the open-
those prohibited by a specified Other adopters of Creative access context, the Attribution li-
condition, have been adopted by Commons licenses impose addi- cense in my opinion remains the
a variety of institutional and in- tional conditions on users. Two gold standard.
dividual copyright owners. of these conditions, called Share- Disclosure forms provided by the author
are available with the full text of this article
All Creative Commons licens- Alike and NoDerivatives, concern
at NEJM.org.
es require that users who repub- adaptations of the licensed work.
From Washington College of Law, Ameri-
lish or reuse a work in a way that The Wikipedia community, for
can University, Washington, DC.
would otherwise infringe copy- example, has adopted the Creative
1. The University of California, San Francis-
right give attribution as directed Commons Attribution ShareAlike
co, Open Access Policy (http://www.library
by the copyright owner. That s license, which requires both at-
.ucsf.edu/help/scholpub/oapolicy).
the only condition included in tribution and that any adapta-
2. The GUSTO Investigators. An interna-
tional randomized trial comparing four
the Creative Commons Attribu- tions be licensed under the same
thrombolytic strategies for acute myocardial
tion license  the only Creative license. MIT OpenCourseWare,
infarction. N Engl J Med 1993;329:673-82.
Commons license meeting the from the Massachusetts Institute
3. Creative Commons home page (www
definition of  open access en- of Technology, adopted the li- .creativecommons.org).
4. University of Michigan open.michigan
dorsed by the Budapest, Bethes- cense with the Attribution and
home page (http://open.umich.edu/
da, and Berlin declarations. This ShareAlike conditions but added
education/med).
license is used by leading open- a NonCommercial condition, pro-
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1300040
access publishers such as PLOS hibiting commercial uses. The Copyright © 2013 Massachusetts Medical Society.
The Downside of Open-Access Publishing
Charlotte Haug, M.D., Ph.D.
ver the past couple of years, serve as their editors-in-chief. nals and publishers at a rapidly
Omany people involved in sci- Personally, I have been alternate- increasing pace should be taken
entific research and publishing ly amused and annoyed by these seriously, since it affects the sci-
have received increasing num- messages. A glance at the jour- entific record as a whole.
bers of emails with invitations to nal s name or the associated web- The Internet has profoundly
submit papers to newly estab- site has told me that these simply and permanently changed the
lished journals, join their edito- are not serious publications. But ways in which information can
rial boards, or even apply to the establishment of new jour- be disseminated and discussed.
791
n engl j med 368;9 nejm.org february 28, 2013
The New England Journal of Medicine
Downloaded from nejm.org on February 5, 2015. For personal use only. No other uses without permission.
Copyright © 2013 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.
PERSPECTIVE
The Downside of Open-Access Publishing
And since scientific publishing is and operate using fly-by-night, thing they aren t, misleading au-
precisely about getting new find- unsustainable business models. thors, readers, and the scientific
ings out to researchers and read- Beall is not the first person community at large.
ers for discussion, the Internet to ask whether the author-pays Most of the new open-access
has changed scientific publish- model can be exploited. Ever journals state that they are inter-
ing considerably, mostly for the since it was introduced, ques- national, scientific, or scholarly
better  and will continue to do tions have been raised about the peer-reviewed journals and offer
so. Distribution costs can be very possibility that publishers would quick turnaround times. Some of
low if a journal chooses to pub- be tempted to lower their edito- them also cover very broad sub-
lish only online, for instance, but rial standards to attract authors ject areas  for example, the
there are still high costs involved who would be happy to see their Academic Research Publishing
for proper peer review and edito- work published quickly and with- Agency publishes the International
rial quality control. The intro- out too much scrutiny. But Beall Journal of Research and Reviews in Ap-
duction, a decade ago, of an has now compiled a list of pub- plied Sciences (www.arpapress.com)
open-access model in which au- lishers and journals that he finds and encourages submissions from
thors pay to have their work pub- questionable and is encouraging a wide range of scientific fields.
lished offered an alternative way discussion in the scientific com- It is difficult to imagine how a
of financing this quality control. munity about these entities and single journal could manage to
But it also opened up opportuni- the criteria that one might use to properly validate papers that are
ties to charge authors a fee to identify them.2 so varied.
publish their papers with little or Whether it s fair to classify all Until recently,  international,
no quality control. these journals and publishers as scientific, peer-reviewed journal
Jeffrey Beall, an academic li-  predatory is an open question has had a fairly specific meaning
brarian at the University of Colo-  several shades of gray may be to the scientific community and
rado, Denver, who is interested distinguishable. Some of the society at large: it has meant a
in scholarly open-access publish- publishers are intentionally mis- journal that checks submitted
ing, calls its more questionable leading, naming nonexistent peo- papers for scientific quality, but
incarnations  predatory. 1  Pred- ple as their editors and editorial also for relevance and interest to
atory, open-access publishers, he board members and claiming its readers, and also ensures that
writes on his blog, Scholarly Open ownership of articles that they it contains new findings that
Access (http://scholarlyoa.com), have plagiarized from other pub- may advance science. These fea-
 are those that unprofessionally lications. Other journals and tures render a journal trustwor-
exploit the author-pays model of publishers on Beall s list may be thy and worthy of readers time
open-access publishing (Gold OA) real, though it s obvious that the and money. Many observers were
for their own profit. Typically, people running them are not very therefore understandably dis-
these publishers spam profes- professional, and some of the turbed when the journal publish-
sional email lists, broadly solicit- publications may have been cre- er Elsevier admitted in 2009 that
ing article submissions for the ated simply because it seemed it had published six  fake jour-
clear purpose of gaining addi- like a clever business scheme to nals funded by pharmaceutical
tional income. Operating essen- collect author fees of several companies  in Elsevier s own
tially as vanity presses, these hundred dollars apiece to post words,  sponsored article com-
publishers typically have a low papers in a journal-like layout at pilation publications . . . that
article acceptance threshold, a fraction of the traditional price. were made to look like journals
with a false-front or non-existent Viewed in some lights, such en- and lacked the proper disclo-
peer review process. Unlike pro- terprises may not be unethical: sures. The company had inten-
fessional publishing operations, thousands of researchers world- tionally exploited the word  jour-
whether subscription-based or wide need to publish, and not all nal to give the impression that
ethically-sound open access, these of them can do so in the highest- these publications were honest
predatory publishers add little ranked journals. But it is surely and reliable.
value to scholarship, pay little problematic for journals and pub- Of course, the terms  inter-
attention to digital preservation, lishers to pretend to be some- national,  scientific,  peer-
792
n engl j med 368;9 nejm.org february 28, 2013
The New England Journal of Medicine
Downloaded from nejm.org on February 5, 2015. For personal use only. No other uses without permission.
Copyright © 2013 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.
PERSPECTIVE
The Downside of Open-Access Publishing
reviewed,  journal,  article, and readers to believe that they it as a waste of time to seek a
 editor, and  publisher do not are submitting to or reading journal that would publish my
have copyrighted or patented something they aren t. research and might be willing to
definitions and can have varied We must recognize that no spend money to make it available
meanings, especially in the In- publication or financing model is, to other researchers and the pub-
ternet age. Must an article be dif- in itself, morally superior to others lic. It would be fair to everyone,
ferent from a submitted paper? or can guarantee high quality. though, to be explicit about the
Isn t everything published online Various models can produce high- fact that these are very different
automatically international? Is quality content, and all are vul- types of publications. With great-
there anything wrong with a sit- nerable to exploitation. It might er transparency, the questionable
uation in which the editor and make the most sense to concern or predatory publishers who are
publisher are just one person ourselves less with the publication using either author-pays or sub-
who has set up a website where or financing model used and more scription models would also be
researchers can submit their pa- with ensuring transparency about easier to spot  and avoid.
pers and pay a fee to have them a publication s content and edi- Disclosure forms provided by the author
are available with the full text of this article
laid out in a professional way torial processes. And perhaps we
at NEJM.org.
and made available to all inter- should insist that not all these
ested parties? Isn t it a good enterprises can be called  scien- From the Journal of the Norwegian Medical
Association, Oslo, Norway.
thing that this vast number of tific journals. As a reader, I do
new publishers and journals will not want to spend my time read- 1. Beall J. Predatory publishers are corrupt-
ing open access. Nature 2012;489:179.
make it possible to get all re- ing vast quantities of low-quality
2. Idem. Criteria for determining predatory
search  whatever its quality research and would be willing to
open-access publishers (2nd edition). Schol-
level  into the public domain? pay for someone to do the sort of
arly Access Publishers (http://scholarlyoa
.com/2012/11/30/criteria-for-determining-
Perhaps. But describing a simple filtering for quality, relevance,
predatory-open-access-publishers-2nd-
online-posting service as  an in- and novelty that journal editors
edition).
ternational, scientific, peer-re- have traditionally done. As a re-
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1214750
viewed journal leads authors searcher, by contrast, I might see Copyright © 2013 Massachusetts Medical Society.
793
n engl j med 368;9 nejm.org february 28, 2013
The New England Journal of Medicine
Downloaded from nejm.org on February 5, 2015. For personal use only. No other uses without permission.
Copyright © 2013 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.