>It is unlikely that many authors have contracts with publishers requiring a >particular license even at the time of publication.
When an author submits a paper to a journal they often get a selection of licenses to choose from. Surely that’s part of the contract to publish? David On 29 Apr 2015, at 12:52, Heather Morrison <heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: Graham makes some good points. Anyone who is sharing a work under any Creative Commons license, or any other type of license, has no obligation to keep the work available at all, or under the same license, in perpetuity. I can post a picture to flickr under whatever terms I choose, immediately change my mind and change the terms. If someone used the work in the seconds it was available under the initial terms, I cannot revoke the license. The potential for downstream enclosure posed by CC-BY is not a problem of licenses of individual works, but rather the attraction of large masses of works for profit-taking if CC-BY succeeds as default. Consider for example if there is success transitioning Elsevier's billion-a-year-in-profit, 40% profit margin, STM business to OA as CC-BY. If anyone can take the works published by Elsevier and sell them, these kinds of profits are likely to attract people and/or companies interested in making money. A downstream commercial user could compete with Elsevier. Since they don't need to bother paying a cent to contribute to the original production costs, downstream commercial users are at a relatively advantage compared to the original publisher when it comes to added value services. If this threatens Elsevier revenue streams (eg competition for Science Direct search services as opposed to content, Scopus), it would make business sense for Elsevier to change the license for CC-BY works to more limited terms, or to revert to toll access and use differential pricing to discourage commercial use. This is what shareholders expect (and have a legal right to expect) companies like Elsevier to do - prioritize the bottom line of profit. It is unlikely that many authors have contracts with publishers requiring a particular license even at the time of publication. Funder policies apply to grantees, not publishers. Even if there was an author/publisher license allowing only CC-BY in perpetuity, CC-BY does not prohibit toll access. This is not THE scenario, only one possible scenario. I use Elsevier as an example because many people on the list are familiar with how profitable the company is. A look at Beall's list may be useful to illustrate the wide range of players that can emerge when a business that earns profits for a few companies in the millions starts to open up for competition. Think about the people on Wall Street who sell things like hedge funds and derivatives. An open invitation to downstream commercial use is an open invitation to this sector, too. Elsevier is likely in a stronger position to out-manoeuvre downstream commercial competition than smaller publishers and journals. To appreciate the danger of re-enclosure it is important to think about the scholarly publishing system as a whole rather than individual works. best, Heather Morrison Creative Commons and Open Access Critique series: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/10/critique-of-cc-by-series.html?m=1 On Apr 29, 2015, at 1:59 AM, "Graham Triggs" <grahamtri...@gmail.com<mailto:grahamtri...@gmail.com>> wrote: On 28 April 2015 at 22:45, Heather Morrison <heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: There is nothing in any of the CC licenses that requires that works be made available free of charge, either by the downstream user or by the original licensor. It is true that a CC license cannot be revoked, however the catch is you have to have a copy of the work and proof of the license under which you obtained the work. There is nothing to stop the original licensor from changing their mind, taking down the CC-BY copy and replacing it with a work under whatever terms they like (or not making the work available at all). In any licence that a work is distributed under, there is nothing compelling the distributor to continue to distribute the work in perpetuity under the same licence conditions. This argument is basically that while CC-BY may appear to be highly desirable and reflect the BOAI definition of OA (which I now reject as the source of the problem), it is a weak license full of loopholes that could be the downfall of open access. See my statement above. Licences attached to the distribution of a work just deal with how people that receive the work can make use of it. What the publisher / distributor can do has to be governed by the rights assigned to them by the author / copyright holder, and/or the contract that is in place between the author / copyright holder and the publisher / distributor. Even when a journal publishes an article as CC-BY; even when an author deposits a paper to a repository to be distributed as CC-BY, the author is not making the work available to the publisher or repository under a CC-BY licence. They are providing a limited set of rights and/or signing a contract with specific instruction that the distribution to end users must be made as CC-BY. You are trying to attach a problem to a particular licence, that could never, ever be prevented or solved by any licence that exists or could ever be invented in the future. Your concerns can only ever be addressed through the agreements an author makes with a publisher, not through the licence that is offered to end users. The only "loophole" in CC-BY is whether you accept that downstream users can make "commercial" use of the work - and if that is a genuine / serious problem -NC and -SA variants can prevent that. Regards, G _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
