Some open access advocates do equate OA with the CC-BY license, but not all of us. My perspective is that pushing for ubiquitous CC-BY is a major strategic error for the OA movement. Key arguments:
Granting blanket downstream commercial re-use rights allows for downstream toll access whether or a one-off or broad-based scale. Examples (broad-based at end): Actual anonymous example reported to me: book publisher pushed by funder with policy to use CC-BY license. Downstream commercial re-use: take the book, strip third-party Non-CC-BY content, sell book on Amazon. This competes with the publisher's freemium model (threat to needed revenue source for OA) and impacts publisher reputation (lawsuit on basis of moral rights an option but outcome not clear and some of us would prefer not to invite such re-use rather than suing). Is this the GOAL of open access? Blanket CC-BY rights for works are problematic. Many scholarly authors and journals include third party works which may not be available for CC-BY licensing. These works do not always come from academia, and those that do are not necessarily restricted to works published after CC-BY licenses were developed, so a 100% academic CC-BY scenario would not address this issue. This means that even if you think ubiquitous CC-BY is a great idea, the most optimistic possibility is a mixed licensing environment, with non-CC-BY works mixed in. These third party works that the original author thought worthy of seeking permission to publish may be exactly the bits that the downstream users wants to use. In my opinion this warrants research. A related problem is that strong CC-BY requirements may make it more difficult to publish works including bits where authors need to use academic freedom to include portions of works for purposes of academic critique. That is, sometimes we must re-use bits of works to make a point where there is strong possibility that the copyright holder would object to re-use. This is an academic freedom issue. Another academic freedom issue is that pushing authors to re-use of CC-BY works is an intellectual limitation with respect to intellectual work. Nothing was CC licensed before CC licenses were invented about 15 years ago. My works are not CC-BY licensed so OA authors who must publish CC-BY have an incentive to simply ignore my work. Ethics: where human subjects are involved, informed consent to publish their material (stories, pictures, etc.) as CC-BY would require explaining to them the potential consequences. The use of a CC-BY licensed photo of a young girl by Virgin Mobile in an advertising campaign would be a good example to point to as a potential consequence: http://lessig.org/blog/2007/09/on_the_texas_suit_against_virg.html Without such informed consent, downstream problematic re-use is a potential legal risk for author, publisher, and research funder with a CC-BY requirement. The latter might make a particularly attractive target for a lawsuit (obviously has funding, fixed address). A single case of this nature, from my perspective, would be a major reputation all risk for the entire OA movement. It is in the best interests of OA to acknowledge that downstream re-use has potential risks as well as benefits. Worst case scenario for an all-CC-BY PMC: a commercial company copies the whole thing regularly to resell for their own profit (why not, when a blanket invitation for commercial re-use is extended?), and successfully lobbies government supporters of PMC to drop funding for the original as inappropriate competition with the public sector (why not? Many governments are privatizing things like health care, education, public infrastructure?). That is, broad-based CC-BY success risks reversion of the entire system to downstream toll access. I comment on this topic as issues arise in this blog series: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/10/critique-of-cc-by-series.html?m=1 best, Heather Morrison OA advocate, CC-BY sceptic and CC-BY requirement opponent -------- Original message -------- From: Richard Poynder <richard.poyn...@cantab.net> Date: 2017-01-23 4:48 AM (GMT-05:00) To: goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] How much of the content in open repositories is able to meet the definition of open access? OA advocates maintain that the formative definition of open access agreed at the meeting that led to the Budapest Open Access Initiative means that only papers with a CC BY licence attached can be described as open access. And yet millions of papers in open repositories are not available with a CC BY licence. Take, for instance, PubMed Central, which currently has 4.2 million documents deposited in it. A recent search shows that only 24% of the non-historical documents in PMC have a CC BY licence, and so 76% of the content cannot be described as open access. The good news is that the CC BY percentage in PMC is growing over time. Nevertheless, that it has still only reached 24% a decade after the NIH Public Access policy came into effect suggests that the OA movement still has a way to go if it is to live up to the BOAI definition. More here: http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/the-nih-public-access-policy-triumph-of.html Richard Poynder
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