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

["Andy Gass" <agass@plos.org>]

Many thanks to those who have chimed in to clarify a number of these
points on my behalf. For a more comprehensive presentation of PLoS'
position on these matters, you can find an editorial that will appear in
the July issue of PLoS Biology, entitled "Whose Copy? Whose Rights?" at
http://www.plos.org/downloads/copyrights.pdf .

Briefly, though:

PLoS does endorse the Bethesda definition of "open access." As for how
widespread the support for this definition is among open access
proponents, it's a little hard to say, er, definitively. The Berlin
Declaration, with its steadily growing list of signatories, includes the
clause, "In accordance with the spirit of. . . the Bethesda Meeting on
Open Access Publishing. . ."; but I confess that I'm unclear regarding the
practical implications of the difference between the "spirit" of the
Bethesda Meeting and the definition it produced. In general, though, the
language from Bethesda does seems to be among the more commonly used
definitions of open access.

In practice, all works published by PLoS are governed by the Creative
Commons Attribution License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).
The terms of this license meet criterion (1) of the Bethesda Definition
(see http://www.plos.org/openaccess), and actually supersede it one
regard: the license permits users to make unlimited numbers of print
copies of an article, or even a whole journal.

I hope this helps to clear up what I was (apparently quite feebly!) trying
to say; but please let me know if more explanation would be useful on any
of these points.

Best,

----------
Andy Gass
Outreach Coordinator
Public Library of Science