Page:Finch Group report.pdf/87

 downloads from the publisher’s site. Nevertheless, a survey of librarians conducted by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers indicates that if embargo periods were to be reduced to six months, 10% of them would cancel all science, technology and medicine (STM) journals, and a further 34% would cancel subscriptions to some of them; the figures for arts, humanities and social science journals were 23% and 42% respectively.

7.68. Such evidence has reinforced the concerns of subscription-based publishers who may be, for whatever reason, unable to make a rapid move to open access publishing, that a reduction in the allowable embargo period to only six months, especially if combined with a requirement to eliminate any restrictions on use and re-use, would put the viability of their journals at severe risk.

Use and re-use rights

7.69. We noted earlier that access is not just about the ability to read a publication, but about what users can do with the content: to analyse and manipulate it; to shift it from one format to another; to re-use and re-purpose it in many different ways to facilitate the creation of new knowledge. Use and re-use rights depend to a significant extent on the formats in which content is made available: the range of potential uses of a PDF file, for example, tend to be more limited than for content that is made available in HTML or XML. Word-processed text files in repositories may thus be much less ‘useful’ to users than more advanced formats. The key for researchers and many other users is that published content should be accessible in formats that are as easy to manipulate as possible; and that any restrictions on what they can do with the content should be minimal, if they exist at all. Researchers want the maximum freedom to use the latest tools and services to make the best use of the information to which they have access.

7.70. But for subscription-based publishers, re-use rights may pose problems. Any requirement for them to use a Creative Commons ‘CC-BY’ licence, for example, would allow users to modify, build upon and distribute the licensed work, for commercial as well as non-commercial purposes, so long as the original authors were credited. Publishers—and some researchers—are especially concerned about allowing commercial re-use. Medical journal publishers, who derive a considerable part of their revenues from the sale of reprints to pharmaceutical companies, could face significant loss of income. But more