Dear Stephen, Thanks for your reaction. I should have said "Any publication shared with a CC-license is free of charges, as is any publication you find online shared with a public domain dedication. Period."
Of course, as you rightly say there can be paid (re)publications of works in the public domain. And indeed licenses (whether liberal or restricted) do not guarantee availability. That can only be promised but not guaranteed by libraries and sustainable online archives with good contingency plans. Jeroen Bosman Utrecht University Library ________________________________ From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [goal-boun...@eprints.org] on behalf of Downes, Stephen [stephen.dow...@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca] Sent: Saturday, March 24, 2018 5:35 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Public domain and/or CC-BY facilitate toll access Jeroen Bosman wrote, "Any publication shared with a CC-license is free of charges, as is any publication in the public domain. Period." This is simply not true. Thomas Hardy's book 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' is public domain, having been published in 1886. However, if you go to a book store and try to take a copy without paying, you will be arrested and charged with theft. If you search for it online, you can find it for sale on Amazon and other sites. You will have to pay money before they give you a copy. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56759.The_Mayor_of_Casterbridge It is true that you can find it for free on sites like Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/143/143-h/143-h.htm But it's availability for free is not guaranteed by the license. Someone like Project Gutenberg must make it available for download. If this doesn't happen, then the only way to get a copy to pay money. Even if it's CC or public domain. -- Stephen ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen Downes National Research Council Canada | Conseil national de recherches Canada 1200 rue Montreal Road 349 M-50, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0R6 Tel.: (613) 993 0288 Mobile: (613) 292 1789 stephen.dow...@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca<mailto:stephen.dow...@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca> ~ http://www.downes.ca<http://www.downes.ca/> ________________________________ From: goal-boun...@eprints.org <goal-boun...@eprints.org> on behalf of Bosman, J.M. (Jeroen) <j.bos...@uu.nl> Sent: Saturday, March 24, 2018 12:08 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: Re: [GOAL] Public domain and/or CC-BY facilitate toll access Heather, Again, I think this argument creates much confusion. Any publication shared with a CC-license is free of charges, as is any publication in the public domain. Period. (Just for reference, as I am sure that you know the license terms, this is what the CC-BY license says: "....a worldwide, royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license to exercise the Licensed Rights in the Licensed Material to: reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part; and produce, reproduce, and Share Adapted Material.....") The fact that I can put water from a free public tap provided by a municipality into a bottle and try to sell that bottle to people for 3€ does not make that water from the tap less free. (For the sake of the argument just supposing that the flow of water is endless.) Having commercial additional functions on open access content that carries a CC-BY license or is in the public domain is fully compatible with the principles of the scholarly commons. The free, open version will remain in place as part of the common pool of resources. By the way, even if you use a CC-BY-BC license and even if your publication is fully copyrighted without any CC-license, private profits can be generated form using the metadata, as Google Scholar, Dimensions and other products show. Your CC-BY-NC licensed publication makes these products more valuable, just by being able to refer to it. And if you are looking for examples of companies charging for free stuff, the best example you can find nowadays in de scholalry world is probably ..... JSTOR. Look for instance at their Sustainability thematic collection (https://about.jstor.org/whats-in-jstor/sustainability/) that consists of many thousands of reports freely available on the web and sold for many thousands of dollars in yearly subscriptions to libraries. Jeroen Bosman Utrecht University Library ________________________________ From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [goal-boun...@eprints.org] on behalf of Heather Morrison [heather.morri...@uottawa.ca] Sent: Saturday, March 24, 2018 2:56 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Public domain and/or CC-BY facilitate toll access This is a repeat of one argument I made last week to focus on one argument at a time. Either public domain or CC-BY is consistent with, and facilitates, toll access, both by the original publisher and downstream. To date the best examples I have seen of creative use of CC-BY for commercial profit-making are Elsevier's ability to incorporate such works into their toll access services such as Scopus and metadata sales, at no cost to Elsevier, and Springer's harvesting of images from CC-BY works for TA image bank (few years ago). US public domain to works created by federal employees works really well in areas where the US government itself posts the works online for free access. Published works that are public domain are often included in toll access packages. Not even PubMed has free access to all the works created by its own employees. Public domain and Creative Commons are not necessarily "free of charge". Hence if free of charge is essential to a definition of open access, neither public domain nor CC are sufficient to achieve OA. best, Heather Morrison
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