Re: OA and copyright -- Andy Gass quote in LJ News Wire

[JOHANNES VELTEROP <velteropvonleyden@btinternet.com>]

I suspect that Andy meant that genuinely open access articles are not
subject to the distribution restrictions that copyright owners often
impose. The ideal copyright line for an open access author is something
like this:  (c) The Author. Please copy this article as often as possible
and distribute it as widely as possible, but don't forget to acknowledge
the author. At BioMed Central we achieve that by asking authors to sign up
to the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. By doing so, they do not give
up or transfer their copyright, but *use* their copyright to achieve the
widest possible distribution of their article.
 
Jan Velterop

Rick Anderson <rickand@unr.edu> wrote:
I was reading the LJ Academic Op-Ed Wi... oops, I mean the LJ Academic
News Wire this morning, and noticed this from a report on an OA debate
that took place at ALA last month:

"Andy Gass of PLoS responded, 'Genuine open access articles are those
whose prospective digital use is unlimited,' noting, for example, that
those writing for such journals 'have no interest in suing copy shops.'"

Now, I may not be accurately comprehending Andy Gass's meaning here, but
it sounds to me like he's saying that for an article to be genuinely
Open Access, it shouldn't be subject to copyright. (I can't think of
any other way to interpret the phrase "prospective digital use is
unlimited.")

So my questions are two:

1. Is this really what he meant to say?
2. If so, is his view generally held by OA advocates?

----
Rick Anderson
rickand@unr.edu