Just a short summary of the current discussion about open access in Germany. In the last few months most big german newspapers published articles of authors who "enriched" the debate about open access with their dislike of Google Book Search (GBS), rants against pirate bay and at least
one article even managed to mention the fight against child pornography within its arguments (see a response to this
here).
It all started with the publication of the so-called
"Heidelberg Appeal", a paper that mixed the arguments against GBS and against open access and that got support by more than one thousand german authors and scientists. It soon got clear that at least some of them
never understood that the appeal contained a rejection of the open access principles. There seems to be a diffuse and not completely groundless anxiety among german writers that Google might overtake their rights and publish their works without permission.
The most profound response was published by the
Aktionsbündnis "Urheberrecht für Bildung und Wissenschaft", which I would recommend as reading to everybody who ever published scientific work in Germany. In short, the Aktionsbündnis first points out the differences between the ideas of open access and GBS and that the discussion about GBS should of course be separated from the discussion about open access. It does not see Google as the evil thief, but suggests that authors should register at the Google settlement website and send a protest to the Google Settlement Administrator that it is not possible for them to allow Google to publish their work while simultaneously prohibiting any commercial utilization. This combination would allow authors to publish their work as open access within GBS, as long as the european efforts of digitalizing and freely publishing scientific works are not yet a serious alternative to GBS.
Another participant, the german copyright asssociation VG Wort, is currently trying to get all german authors to join in on their campaign to negotiate directly with Google (
read this). The authors should transfer their rights they got via the Google settlement. The VG Wort will then act for the authors in its negotiations with Google and later distribute the money that Google will pay for the usage of the digitalized books and articles. In a
response to this initiative, the Aktionsbündnis "Urheberrecht für Bildung und Wissenschaft" points out that this development will counter the possibilities and the freedom gained through open access publication in the scientific community. The Aktionsbündnis recommends that all scientific authors that got contacted by the VG Wort should veto against this initiative and instead directly protest against the Google Settlement, as described above. It seems clear that the VG Wort will try to restrict the usage of the digitalized data by Google and maximize the profit for german authors. While this seems a natural process for non-scientific authors who live from the publication of their works, the scientific community should prevent any further commercialization of publicly financed scientific work.
The current trend of making scientific works freely available supports the scientific communication within scientific communities. Open access publications become the the standard way of distributing scientific work in more and more research areas, which facilitates the scientific exchange within those areas. A list of linguistic open access journals
can be found here. A longer list of articles and opinions within the ongoing debate in Germany
is here.
