4 The Complete Guide to Open Scholarship Openness as an Author’s Right The concept of openness in scholarship is closely connected with the authors’ rights movement. In traditional publishing, the transfer of copy- right from the authors to the publishers for getting works published through their publishing channels is still a common practice. When transferring copyright of a work to the publisher, authors actually transfer the entire bundle of their exclusive author rights, namely the rights for reproduction, distribution, public performance and display, and creation of derivative works.6 The goal of the authors’ rights movement (and one of the goals of open scholarship) is to return control of scholarly and creative works from the publishers back to the authors. One way to accomplish this goal is to use a free legal tool developed by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) called the Addendum to Pub- lication Agreement.7 If accepted by the publisher, the addendum enables authors to retain individual copyrights, including the right to self-archive8 their works in a disciplinary or institutional repository. Retaining the right to self-archive is becoming increasingly important to researchers whose works fall under research funders’ public access mandates that require grant recipients to share the results of their research with the public. Openness as a User’s Right Some of the foundational definitions of openness require that infor- mation should not only be freely accessible but also be allowed to be freely used and reused. Openness as a user’s right was originally advo- cated by the leader of the Free Software Movement, Richard Stallman, whose goal was to “[spread] freedom and cooperation” in order to “make our society better” (Stallman 2006, 75). According to Stallman, a soft- ware program is free if the program’s user has the four essential freedoms: 1. The freedom to run the program in any way, for any purpose 2. The freedom to change the program to suit the user’s needs 3. The freedom to redistribute copies of the program to help others 4. The freedom to distribute copies of the improved version of the program to give others a chance to benefit from the changes (Ibid., 133) The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) has adopted a similar defi- nition of “open knowledge:” “Knowledge is open if anyone is free to
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