Frank,
This is an interesting point and probably the first solid argument in
favor of CC-BY-NC that I've heard. But I want to highlight a few
circumstances that, in my opinion, make this case an exception rather
than a rule.
1. The book - like most (or all?) academic books published for profit -
was a _review_ of existing knowledge, not new original research. The
paper was also a review, and the entire journal "Living Reviews in
Relativity" is by definition devoted to review papers rather than
original research.
But: ~99% of other journals and papers are original research not
reviews. Nobody would even consider them for inclusion in any book,
because the results contained in them are too fresh, too narrow and not
yet verified and established in a given discipline.
2. The journal has an exceptionally high impact factor and I guess it's
one of the leading journals in your discipline.
Again, ~99% of papers out there don't enjoy the benefits of such high
impact factors and prestige of the journal, which means that their
chances of being even considered for re-publication anywhere else are
very low. The primary concern for 99% of authors is not too much
interest in their papers, but too little interest, too few readers and
too low dissemination.
Best,
Marcin
On 01/29/2013 10:55 AM, Editor Living Reviews wrote:
I'd just like to add the point of view of the Living Reviews OA journals
with an example why we currently argue in favor of CC-BY-NC.
First, since not only Marcin Wojnarski doubts that
anyone want to pay for a paper which is elsewhere available for free?
Our long review articles would make perfect (text-)books if anyone could
sell them without asking for publisher's or the author's permission.
Example:
The open access review "The Post-Newtonian Approximation for
Relativistic Compact Binaries" (http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2007-2)
was republished by Oxford UP as a major part of "Equations of Motion in
General Relativity"
(http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199584109.001.0001)
in 2011.
Original price at amazon.com: $98.50 for 156 pages!
Of course, this example does not completely illustrate the possible
misuse of CC-BY: here, the author agreed to the commercial reprint, and
the original review was extended by other authors' contributions.
However, they could have easily sold only the Futamase part as a book.
With CC-BY, the publisher would not even have to ask the authors or
original OA publisher for reprint permission. Moreover, the authors (who
usually write time-consuming reviews in addition to their publicly
funded research) would not financially benefit from this commercial
reuse in any way. Therefore, our authors would object to Peter
Murray-Rust, who has
never met a scientist who has argued for CC-NC over CC-BY.
In short, in a world where companies collate wikipedia articles and sell
them on amazon, why wouldn't there be a marked for commercial OA reprints?
(And, if someone wants to sell them, e.g., as book-on-demand, at least
it should be the OA publishers and authors themselves...)
Frank
--
Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIT
http://tunedit.org
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TunedIT - Online Laboratory for Intelligent Algorithms
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