Heather has mentioned in her posts a couple of times the fact that in the 
Review of RCUK Open Access Policy, ‘Scholars and scholarly societies noted that 
the RCUK preference for CC-BY was problematic with respect to third party 
works’.  In the interests of balance it is worth remembering, and Heather 
doesn’t mention this, that the Review concluded:

'There are ways to protect third party material even within a CC-BY-licensed 
article, but this is not well-understood by all rights-owners, and the issue 
will take some time to be resolved.’


David

On 27 May 2015, at 19:05, Heather Morrison 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

On 2015-05-27, at 12:37 PM, Kathleen Shearer wrote:

Elsevier’s new policy also requires that accepted manuscripts posted in open 
access repositories bear a CC-BY-NC-ND license. This type of license severely 
limits the re-use potential of publicly funded research. ND restricts the use 
of derivatives, yet derivative use is fundamental to the way in which scholarly 
research builds on previous findings, for example by re-using a part of an 
article (with attribution) in educational material.

Comments:

Creative Commons has existed for about 10 years. Scholars have been building on 
previous findings for millenia. In the past few centuries, scholarship has 
flourished in building on the results of previous findings in a largely All 
Rights Reserved environment.

Education is an important public good, and related to scholarly research. 
Scholars need education before they can research. However, they are not the 
same thing. The open movements - open education, open government, open source, 
open data and open access - each involve different groups with different 
interests. It is, in my opinion, an error to conflate these movements. For 
example, commercial use when applied to open education could mean a 
democratization of knowledge - or a transfer of public goods to private 
educational institutions that could threaten the public institutions that 
produce the work in the first place.

There are valid scholarly reasons for not allowing derivative and commercial 
use, including:

Third party works. Scholars often use third party works, with permission, in 
their articles and books. In doing so, they do not acquire copyright; this 
remains with the original copyright holder. Scholars and scholarly societies 
noted that the RCUK preference for CC-BY was problematic with respect to third 
party works:
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/2014review/

Even if these portions of works have appropriate copyright limitations, if 
people assume that a CC-BY article or journal means that all the work is CC-BY, 
this is a problem for the authors.

Some of the work included in scholarly journals is by or of research subjects 
who have their own rights, for example privacy and sometimes copyright. I argue 
that it is generally not ethical to release such works under terms of blanket 
downstream commercial and re-use rights. Lessig's blog post on the Chang v. 
Virgin Mobile case should be required reading for anyone promoting CC licenses 
for scholarly works:
http://www.lessig.org/2007/09/on-the-texas-suit-against-virg/

The CC license site says this about CC-BY: This license lets others distribute, 
remix, tweak, and build upon your work," 
(from:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/)

Build upon is the tradition in scholarship (even with All Rights Reserved), and 
distribute seems fairly obvious for scholars wishing to share their work. 
However, it is not clear that scholars themselves wish to grant rights to remix 
and tweak their work. Scholarly careers are built on reputation. A poor 
downstream remix or tweak can reflect badly on the original scholar. Some 
scholars are happy to participate in this experiment, but many are not.

I am not supporting Elsevier (still participating in the boycott), however I 
think Elsevier may be closer to the author perspective on this than either COAR 
or SPARC.

best,

Heather Morrison



_______________________________________________
GOAL mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

_______________________________________________
GOAL mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

Reply via email to