GitHub and Microsoft are being sued for using open source software without creator attribution in alleged violation of open licensing requirements. What implications does this have for the scholarly literature and Creative Commons licenses?
The post GitHub is Sued, and We May Learn Something About Creative Commons Licensing appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
by Hannah Schneider (KIM), Maximilian Heber (KIM) and Andreas Kirchner (KIM)
The first Open Access Barcamp took place on 22 and 23 April 2021 – virtually, owing to the pandemic. However, the approximately 80 participants were very enthusiastic about the unusual format. Between 9:00 and 14:30 each day, the participants focussed on a varied programme which they had put together themselves in animated discussions about Open Access topics.
Alongside the annual Open Access Days (German) – a central German-speaking conference on the topic of Open Access – this year’s Open Access Barcamp, which was organised by the Communication, Information, Media Centre (KIM) at the University of Konstanz , also offered the community the chance to exchange ideas, network and learn from each other. The Barcamp format is designed to be more open than a classic conference and deliberately does not use a pre-determined programme. Instead, the participants can suggest topics and hold sessions on issues of their choice. This means that everyone can discuss the topics that they find the most interesting.
Screenshot #1: Session-Voting (CC BY 4.0)
During the session planning it became clear that the Open Access community is currently concerned with many diverse topics.
The great majority of participants were interested in legal topics. One of the sessions included a workshop on legal issues in Open Access consulting in which three groups in parallel worked on two typical consulting cases. The first case was the critical evaluation of a publishing house contract. The issue was broached that contracts like these could entail problems such as substantial cost risks or a restrictive transfer of rights. Regarding service offers, participants discussed how to recognise these disruptive elements and the best way of proceeding in a consultative capacity. The second case was a discussion on the topic of image copyright. The topics of who has rights to an image, how the quotation law applies here and how images are regulated in a publishing house contract were discussed.
During one session on Creative Commons licenses, an intensive discussion developed on the extent to which these were suitable for Open Access books. Using the example of the Saint Philip Street Press publishing house, participants critically discussed the aspect of how publishing houses publish again an Open Access book because open licenses allow reuse and editing of the work. Everyone agreed that this problem exists not only for books but also for all works with open licenses. The group came to the conclusion that honesty and transparency are important for Open Access consulting despite this circumstance: “We’re not sales people, we want to help scientists”.
The topic of secondary publication took up a lot of space owing to the considerable interest of the Barcamp participants. Practitioners met for a major discussion session that dealt with the concrete implementation of secondary publication services. In doing so, they not only discussed the services institutions offer for green Open Access but also how these can be implemented at technical, organisational and legal levels. Together, they discussed challenges in the daily dealings with secondary publications such as automatised imports, publishing house requests or legal checks. Google Scholar alerts, data imports from the Web of Science and the integration of Sherpa Romeo into the institutional repository were mentioned as solution approaches. The scope of secondary publication services for scientists in the individual institutions was also discussed. It became clear that the institutions differ very strongly in their activities but also in their capacities.
Another topic that was discussed was how the publication data management is implemented in the different institutional repositories. Here the role of the Open Access Monitor (German) of the Forschungszentrum Jülich in measuring the publication occurrence was mentioned, but also the problem that metadata are used very inconsistently and must sometimes also be entered later by hand. The discussion on the topic of secondary publication was continued in depth after the session and ultimately led to the establishment of a new digital focus group.
Screenshot #2: Session room in gather.town (CC BY 4.0)
A discussion on the support possibilities of Diamond Open Access and an exchange of ideas about Open Access advocacy as well as promoting Open Access services at one’s own institution also enticed many people to the session rooms. The sessions spanning the publication of research data and the further development of existing Open Access policies as far as suitable Open Science policies all demonstrated that the Open Access community is also interested them. The technical perspectives of publication software were examined as well as the requirements placed on them
The collective know-how of the participants was used to gather recommendations from the community for the further development of the information platform open-access.net into a skills and networking portal. For this purpose, not only was it determined how the current site is used, but also what demands and expectations are placed on a skills and network portal. Among other things, the provision of materials to support Open Access consultation cases and a clearer and more intuitive site structure were mentioned here. These and other ideas will flow into the further development of the website.
Concrete publication topics were also discussed: For example, there was a session about the Gender Publication Gap in Open Access. The general issue of the impact of gender in science was taken up and participants discussed whether this effect would be increased or reduced by Open Access. The discussion came to the conclusion that this is a very multi-faceted topic and the data situation is still very thin.
The topic of scholar-led publishing in the field of Open Access books was examined and the project COPIM was presented. Participants also discussed the topic of transformation, including the aspect of how the project DEAL and the Open Access transformation could be communicated at one’s own institution. Challenges mentioned here included the reallocation of budgets as well as the difficulty of convincing authors to choose always the Open Access option for DEAL publications. The group agreed that active communication within subject departments and committees as well as information material on the website are currently the most promising methods.
Screenshot #3: Collaboration and transcripts of the sessions on MIRO (CC BY 4.0)
The programme’s flexible design offered the participants in the Open Access Barcamp a variety of possibilities to chat about current and everyday Open Access topics. Everyday challenges and issues were discussed in direct dialogue with other practitioners, both in the big sessions and in smaller groups.
Even though, as mentioned at the beginning, the Open Access Barcamp took place in a virtual setting, the readiness of the participants to get actively involved and help shape the event was considerable. Our organisational team found that it was important to create an appealing virtual environment to enable an exchange of ideas and networking to take place online too. In the next blog post we describe the chances and challenges that planning such a dynamic event as an online format brings with it. Stay tuned!
More blog posts about the Open Access Barcamp
You may also find this interesting
This text has been translated from German.
The post Open Access goes Barcamp, Part 1: A new networking opportunity for the Open Access community first appeared on ZBW MediaTalk.
by Ralf Flohr, Stefanie Richter and Olaf Siegert
Open Access monographs are playing an increasingly important role in the Open Access transformation of the publication system: Specialist publishers have reacted to this development and come up with new business models for the publication of books in Open Access (OA). Organisations that promote research and research institutions themselves have established publication funds and provide the financial resources for Open Access publications. Libraries are archiving Open Access publications on their in-house publication servers, making them accessible to the public and ensuring both their visibility and long-term availability.
The question of who is allowed to use an Open Access publication and how is usually regulated with a Creative Commons licence (CC licence) linked to every document. This opens up, for example, depending on how it is structured and under certain conditions, the right to copy, store, archive, redistribute the publication and make it publicly accessible, without having to ask the respective rights holder for consent. Libraries also use the CC licences in this way to incorporate Open Access publications into their stocks and disseminate them. Creative Commons licences thus make barrier-free access to scientific publications possible in the first place.
However, there are problems with the implementation here, particularly regarding the Open Access monographs. Things becomes particularly difficult if third-party material which is subject to another licence is used. The third-party material can mean illustrations, photographs, charts, tables and other diagrams, for example.
If the authors are unable to invoke citation law, they need to get the approval of the rights holder before incorporating this material in their monograph. In many cases, the third-party material is not subject to the Creative Commons licence applicable to the monograph. Authors are much more likely to use third-party material on the basis of another licence that does not confer the same usage possibilities as the CC licence. The principle of ‘all rights reserved’ usually applies to this material. Detailed guidance on handling thirdparty materials can also be found in the OA Books Toolkit from Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN).
In the Quality standards for getting started with Open Access provision of books (PDF) published by the National Contact Point Open Access OA2020-DE, the following is stated on the inclusion of third-party materials under the point rights and licences:
“The rights for illustrations and other external material in the books are clarified, clearly stated and do not hinder the provision of the entire work under a Creative Commons licence.”
Unfortunately, this is often not the case in practice, because some academic publishers furnish the Creative Commons licences of Open Access monographs with restrictions for third-party material. Here are two examples:
Teske, Sven (ed.): Achieving the Paris Climate Agreement Goals, Springer Nature, Cham, 2020.
The Open Access use of the entire work is actually impeded in practice when external material is included, if this material is not subject to the Creative Commons licence as well. In their imprints, the publishers often point out – as standard practice – that further usage rights must be obtained from the respective rights holder for the reuse of this material, even if no such third-party material appears in the monograph in question. This restriction also applies to laws of use which would be covered by the Creative Commons licence per se, for example the permission to disseminate. With the blanket restrictions in the imprint information, the publishers protect themselves in the event that conflicts arise with the rights holders in the further use of the publications. This thereby severely restricts the opportunities that actually arise from the CC licence and creates major challenges for those who would like to reuse the works according to the principles of Creative Commons.
This practice of blanket restrictions is problematic for the dissemination of Open Access publications, particularly for monographs. Obtaining permission for further use, by people who operate repositories for example, is often difficult, representing a hurdle for free dissemination. This means that the monographs cannot be used comprehensively according to the principles of Open Access. Possible usage scenarios, such as publication in scientific and social networks such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, and use as Open Educational Resources (OER) are also made more difficult.
Then again, from a scientific perspective, it would not make sense to disseminate the monographs without the third-party material they contain. Strictly speaking, such monographs can therefore no longer be described as Open Access publications according to the principles of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Rather, it is a form of free Open Access that essentially provides read-only access. A further problem occurs if these documents with machine-readable data are declared to be Creative Commons publications and documented in the relevant search engines, but then cannot be comprehensively used as such.
On the basis of the aspects mentioned above, we believe that this practice of restricted CC licences has a detrimental effect on the development of Open Access. The question is how to prevent this practice in the future, or how to ensure that Open Access publications are provided with unrestricted CC licences. To this end, we have put together some recommendations for the various stakeholders.
What authors and publishers can do:
What Open Access commissioners, libraries and promotion funds can do:
This might also interest you:
This text has been translated from German.
The post Third-Party Material in Open Access Monographs: How Far-Reaching is the Creative Commons Licence Really? first appeared on ZBW MediaTalk.
“For so many years researchers have been confused about what they can and can’t do with respect to copyright …We can make the life of the author easier!”: these were some […]
The post Let’s Align International and National Copyright OA Policy Action appeared first on SPARC Europe.
In the process of gathering APC data this spring, I noticed some good and some problematic practices with respect to journals that have ceased or transferred publisher.
There is no reason to be concerned about OA journals that do not last forever. Some scholarly journals publish continuously for an extended period of time, decades or even centuries. Others publish for a while and then stop. This is normal. A journal that is published largely due to the work of one or two editors may cease to publish when the editor(s) retire. Research fields evolve; not every specialized journal is needed as a publication venue in perpetuity. Journals transfer from one publisher to another for a variety of reasons. Now that there are over 11,000 fully open access journals (as listed in DOAJ), and some open access journals and publishers have been publishing for years or even decades, it is not surprising that some open access journals have ceased to publish new material.
The purpose of this post is to highlight some good practices when journals cease, some situations to avoid, and room for improvement in current practice. In brief, my advice is that when you cease to publish a journal, it is a good practice to continue to list the journal on your website, continue to provide access to content (archived on your website or another such as CLOCKSS, a LOCKKS network, or other archiving services such as national libraries that may be available to you), and link the reader interested in the journal to where the content can be found.
This is an area where even the best practices to date leave some room for improvement. CLOCKSS archiving is a great example of state-of-the-art but CLOCKSS’ statements and practice indicate some common misunderstandings about copyright and Creative Commons licenses. In brief, author copyright and CC licenses and journal-level CC licensing are not compatible. Third parties such as CLOCKSS should not add CC licenses as these are waivers of copyright. CC licenses may be useful tools for archives, however archiving requires archives; the licenses on their own are not sufficient for this purpose.
I have presented some solutions and suggestions to move forward below, and peer review and further suggestions are welcome.
Details and examples
Dove Medical Press is a model of good practice in this respect. For example, if you click on the title link for Dove’s Clinical Oncology in Adolescents and Young Adults a pop-up springs up with the following information:
“Clinical Oncology in Adolescents and Young Adults ceased publishing in January 2017. All new submissions can be made to Adolescent Health, Medicine and Therapeutics. All articles that have been published in Clinical Oncology in Adolescents and Young Adults will continue to be available on the Dove Press site, and will be securely archived with CLOCKSS”.
Because the content is still available via Dove’s website, the journal is not included on the CLOCKSS’ list of triggered content. This is because CLOCKKS releases archived content when it is no longer available from the publisher’s own website.
CLOCKSS Creative Commons licensing statement and practice critique
One critique for CLOCKSS: – from the home page: “CLOCKSS is for the entire world’s benefit. Content no longer available from any publisher (“triggered content”) is available for free. CLOCKSS uniquely assigns this abandoned and orphaned content a Creative Commons license to ensure it remains available forever”.
This reflects some common misperceptions with respect to Creative Commons licenses. As stated on the Creative Commons “share your work” website: [your emphasis added] “Use Creative Commons tools to help share your work. Our free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give you permission to share and use your creative work— on conditions of your choice“.
The CLOCKSS statement “CLOCKSS uniquely assigns this abandoned and orphaned content a Creative Commons license to ensure it remains available forever” is problematic for two reasons.
1. This does not actually reflect CLOCKSS’ practice. The Creative Commons statements associated with triggered content indicate publisher rather than CLOCKSS’ CC licenses. For example, the license statement for the Journal of Pharmacy Teaching on the CLOCKSS website states: “The JournalPharmacyTeaching content is copyright Taylor and Francis and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License”.
2. This would be even more problematic if it did reflect CLOCKSS’ practice. This is because CLOCKSS is not an author or publisher of the scholarly journals and articles included in CLOCKSS. Creative Commons provides a means for copyright owners to indicate willingness to share their work. When a third party such as CLOCKSS uses CC licenses, they are explicitly or implicitly claiming copyright it order to waive their rights under copyright. This reflects an expansion rather than limitation of copyright that may lead to the opposite of what is intended. For example, if one third party is a copyright owner that wishes to claim copyright in order to grant broad-based downstream rights, another third party could use the copyright claim to support their right to claim copyright in order to lock down others’ works. A third party that is a copyright owner providing free access today could use this copyright claim in future as a rationale for toll access. This could come into play if in future toll access seems more desirable from a business perspective.
The CLOCKSS practice of publisher-level copyright (see 1. above) is problematic because Creative Commons first release of CC licenses was in December 2002. Scholarly journal publishing predates 2002 (the first scholarly journals were published in 1665), and not every journal uses CC licenses even today. Retroactive journal-level CC licensing would require re-licensing of every article that was published prior to the journal’s first use of CC licensing.
For example, the copyright statements of volume 1 dated 1990 on the PDFs of the CLOCKSS-triggered Journal of Pharmacy Teaching read: “Journal of Pharmacy Teaching, Vol. l(1)1990 (C) 1990 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved”. This suggests that all authors in this journal at this point in time assigned full copyright to The Haworth Press, although actual practice was probably more complex. For example, if any authors were working for the U.S. federal government at the time, their work would have been public domain by U.S. government policy. Any portions of third party works included would likely have had separate copyright. Even assuming the simplest scenario, all authors had and transferred all rights under copyright to Haworth Press, the authors would retain moral rights, hence it would be necessary to contact all of the authors to obtain their permission to re-license the works under Creative Commons licenses.
The idea of journal-level CC licensing is at odds with the idea of author copyright. This confusion is common. For example, the website of the Open Access Scholarly Publisher’s Association Licensing FAQ states: “one of the criteria for membership is that a publisher must use a liberal license that encourages the reuse and distribution of content” and later “Instead of transferring rights exclusively to publishers (the approach usually followed in subscription publishing), authors grant a non-exclusive license to the publisher to distribute the work, and all users and readers are granted rights to reuse the work”. If copyright and CC licenses really do belong to the authors, then journal-level Creative Commons license statements are incorrect.
Even more room for improvement
The above, while leaving some room for improvement, appears to reflect best practices at the present time. Other approaches leave even more room for improvement. For example, in 2016 Sage acquired open access publisher Libertas Academica. The titles that Sage has continued can now be found on the Sage website. The Libertas Academica titles that Sage no longer publishes can be found as trigged content on the CLOCKSS website. However, the original Libertas Academica website no longer exists and there is no indication of where to find these titles from the Sage website.
Titles that were formerly published by BioMedCentral are simply no longer listed on the BMC list of journals. For example, if you would like to know where to find Gigascience, formerly published by BMC, you can find information at the site of the current publisher, Oxford. A note on the SpringerLink page indicates that BMC maintains an archive of content on its website. However, if you look for Gigascience on the BMC journal list, it simply is not listed. It would be an improvement to follow the practice of Dove and include the title, link to the archived content, and provide a link to the current publisher.
Solutions? Some suggestions
If journals and publishers were encouraged to return copyright to the authors when a journal is no longer published, or a book is no longer being actively marketed (in addition to using their existing rights to archive and make works freely available), then authors, if they chose to do so, could release new versions of their works. For example, a work currently available in PDF could be re-released in XML to facilitate text and data-mining, or perhaps updated versions, and authors could, if desired, release new versions with more liberal licenses than journal-level licenses that must of necessity fit the lowest common denominator (the author least willing or able to share).
Education, among the existing open access community, and beyond is needed. First, we need to understand the perhaps unavoidable micro level nature of at least some elements of copyright under conditions of re-use of material. For example, if a CC-BY licensed image by one photographer or artist is included in a scholarly article written by a different person that is also CC-BY licensed, the moral rights, including attribution, are different for the copyright holder of the image and that of the author of the article. In academia, attribution and moral rights are essential to our careers.
The intersection of plagiarism and copyright is different in academia. If one musical composer copies another’s work, copyright law is likely the go-to remedy. If a student presents someone else’s work as their own, academic procedures for dealing with plagiarism will apply, regardless of the copyright status of the work. For example, the musician using a public domain work need not worry about copyright but the student using a public domain work without attribution is guilty of plagiarism and likely to face serious consequences. Evolving norms for other types of creators (amateur or professional photographers, video game developers) may not work for academia.
For CLOCKSS, a statement that all triggered content is made freely available to the public, and that additional rights may be available for some works, with advice to look at the work in question to understand re-use rights, would be an improvement.
Your comments and suggestions?
This is an area where even today’s best practices are wanting, and the solutions / suggestions listed above are intended as an invitation to open a conversation on potential emerging practices that may take some time to fully figure out. Peer review and suggestions are welcome, via the comments section or e-mail. If you are using e-mail, please let me know if I may transfer the content to this post and if so whether you would like to be attributed or not.
This post is cross-posted to the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons research blog and forms part of the Creative Commons and Open Access Critique series. Comments and suggestions are welcome on either blog.
In the process of gathering APC data this spring, I noticed some good and some problematic practices with respect to journals that have ceased or transferred publisher.
There is no reason to be concerned about OA journals that do not last forever. Some scholarly journals publish continuously for an extended period of time, decades or even centuries. Others publish for a while and then stop. This is normal. A journal that is published largely due to the work of one or two editors may cease to publish when the editor(s) retire. Research fields evolve; not every specialized journal is needed as a publication venue in perpetuity. Journals transfer from one publisher to another for a variety of reasons. Now that there are over 11,000 fully open access journals (as listed in DOAJ), and some open access journals and publishers have been publishing for years or even decades, it is not surprising that some open access journals have ceased to publish new material.
The purpose of this post is to highlight some good practices when journals cease, some situations to avoid, and room for improvement in current practice. In brief, my advice is that when you cease to publish a journal, it is a good practice to continue to list the journal on your website, continue to provide access to content (archived on your website or another such as CLOCKSS, a LOCKKS network, or other archiving services such as national libraries that may be available to you), and link the reader interested in the journal to where the content can be found.
This is an area where even the best practices to date leave some room for improvement. CLOCKSS archiving is a great example of state-of-the-art but CLOCKSS’ statements and practice indicate some common misunderstandings about copyright and Creative Commons licenses. In brief, author copyright and CC licenses and journal-level CC licensing are not compatible. Third parties such as CLOCKSS should not add CC licenses as these are waivers of copyright. CC licenses may be useful tools for archives, however archiving requires archives; the licenses on their own are not sufficient for this purpose.
I have presented some solutions and suggestions to move forward below, and peer review and further suggestions are welcome.
Details and examples
Dove Medical Press is a model of good practice in this respect. For example, if you click on the title link for Dove’s Clinical Oncology in Adolescents and Young Adults a pop-up springs up with the following information:
“Clinical Oncology in Adolescents and Young Adults ceased publishing in January 2017. All new submissions can be made to Adolescent Health, Medicine and Therapeutics. All articles that have been published in Clinical Oncology in Adolescents and Young Adults will continue to be available on the Dove Press site, and will be securely archived with CLOCKSS”.
Because the content is still available via Dove’s website, the journal is not included on the CLOCKSS’ list of triggered content. This is because CLOCKKS releases archived content when it is no longer available from the publisher’s own website.
CLOCKSS Creative Commons licensing statement and practice critique
One critique for CLOCKSS: – from the home page: “CLOCKSS is for the entire world’s benefit. Content no longer available from any publisher (“triggered content”) is available for free. CLOCKSS uniquely assigns this abandoned and orphaned content a Creative Commons license to ensure it remains available forever”.
This reflects some common misperceptions with respect to Creative Commons licenses. As stated on the Creative Commons “share your work” website: [your emphasis added] “Use Creative Commons tools to help share your work. Our free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give you permission to share and use your creative work— on conditions of your choice“.
The CLOCKSS statement “CLOCKSS uniquely assigns this abandoned and orphaned content a Creative Commons license to ensure it remains available forever” is problematic for two reasons.
1. This does not actually reflect CLOCKSS’ practice. The Creative Commons statements associated with triggered content indicate publisher rather than CLOCKSS’ CC licenses. For example, the license statement for the Journal of Pharmacy Teaching on the CLOCKSS website states: “The JournalPharmacyTeaching content is copyright Taylor and Francis and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License”.
2. This would be even more problematic if it did reflect CLOCKSS’ practice. This is because CLOCKSS is not an author or publisher of the scholarly journals and articles included in CLOCKSS. Creative Commons provides a means for copyright owners to indicate willingness to share their work. When a third party such as CLOCKSS uses CC licenses, they are explicitly or implicitly claiming copyright it order to waive their rights under copyright. This reflects an expansion rather than limitation of copyright that may lead to the opposite of what is intended. For example, if one third party is a copyright owner that wishes to claim copyright in order to grant broad-based downstream rights, another third party could use the copyright claim to support their right to claim copyright in order to lock down others’ works. A third party that is a copyright owner providing free access today could use this copyright claim in future as a rationale for toll access. This could come into play if in future toll access seems more desirable from a business perspective.
The CLOCKSS practice of publisher-level copyright (see 1. above) is problematic because Creative Commons first release of CC licenses was in December 2002. Scholarly journal publishing predates 2002 (the first scholarly journals were published in 1665), and not every journal uses CC licenses even today. Retroactive journal-level CC licensing would require re-licensing of every article that was published prior to the journal’s first use of CC licensing.
For example, the copyright statements of volume 1 dated 1990 on the PDFs of the CLOCKSS-triggered Journal of Pharmacy Teaching read: “Journal of Pharmacy Teaching, Vol. l(1)1990 (C) 1990 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved”. This suggests that all authors in this journal at this point in time assigned full copyright to The Haworth Press, although actual practice was probably more complex. For example, if any authors were working for the U.S. federal government at the time, their work would have been public domain by U.S. government policy. Any portions of third party works included would likely have had separate copyright. Even assuming the simplest scenario, all authors had and transferred all rights under copyright to Haworth Press, the authors would retain moral rights, hence it would be necessary to contact all of the authors to obtain their permission to re-license the works under Creative Commons licenses.
The idea of journal-level CC licensing is at odds with the idea of author copyright. This confusion is common. For example, the website of the Open Access Scholarly Publisher’s Association Licensing FAQ states: “one of the criteria for membership is that a publisher must use a liberal license that encourages the reuse and distribution of content” and later “Instead of transferring rights exclusively to publishers (the approach usually followed in subscription publishing), authors grant a non-exclusive license to the publisher to distribute the work, and all users and readers are granted rights to reuse the work”. If copyright and CC licenses really do belong to the authors, then journal-level Creative Commons license statements are incorrect.
Even more room for improvement
The above, while leaving some room for improvement, appears to reflect best practices at the present time. Other approaches leave even more room for improvement. For example, in 2016 Sage acquired open access publisher Libertas Academica. The titles that Sage has continued can now be found on the Sage website. The Libertas Academica titles that Sage no longer publishes can be found as trigged content on the CLOCKSS website. However, the original Libertas Academica website no longer exists and there is no indication of where to find these titles from the Sage website.
Titles that were formerly published by BioMedCentral are simply no longer listed on the BMC list of journals. For example, if you would like to know where to find Gigascience, formerly published by BMC, you can find information at the site of the current publisher, Oxford. A note on the SpringerLink page indicates that BMC maintains an archive of content on its website. However, if you look for Gigascience on the BMC journal list, it simply is not listed. It would be an improvement to follow the practice of Dove and include the title, link to the archived content, and provide a link to the current publisher.
Solutions? Some suggestions
If journals and publishers were encouraged to return copyright to the authors when a journal is no longer published, or a book is no longer being actively marketed (in addition to using their existing rights to archive and make works freely available), then authors, if they chose to do so, could release new versions of their works. For example, a work currently available in PDF could be re-released in XML to facilitate text and data-mining, or perhaps updated versions, and authors could, if desired, release new versions with more liberal licenses than journal-level licenses that must of necessity fit the lowest common denominator (the author least willing or able to share).
Education, among the existing open access community, and beyond is needed. First, we need to understand the perhaps unavoidable micro level nature of at least some elements of copyright under conditions of re-use of material. For example, if a CC-BY licensed image by one photographer or artist is included in a scholarly article written by a different person that is also CC-BY licensed, the moral rights, including attribution, are different for the copyright holder of the image and that of the author of the article. In academia, attribution and moral rights are essential to our careers.
The intersection of plagiarism and copyright is different in academia. If one musical composer copies another’s work, copyright law is likely the go-to remedy. If a student presents someone else’s work as their own, academic procedures for dealing with plagiarism will apply, regardless of the copyright status of the work. For example, the musician using a public domain work need not worry about copyright but the student using a public domain work without attribution is guilty of plagiarism and likely to face serious consequences. Evolving norms for other types of creators (amateur or professional photographers, video game developers) may not work for academia.
For CLOCKSS, a statement that all triggered content is made freely available to the public, and that additional rights may be available for some works, with advice to look at the work in question to understand re-use rights, would be an improvement.
Your comments and suggestions?
This is an area where even today’s best practices are wanting, and the solutions / suggestions listed above are intended as an invitation to open a conversation on potential emerging practices that may take some time to fully figure out. Peer review and suggestions are welcome, via the comments section or e-mail. If you are using e-mail, please let me know if I may transfer the content to this post and if so whether you would like to be attributed or not.
This post is cross-posted to the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons research blog and forms part of the Creative Commons and Open Access Critique series. Comments and suggestions are welcome on either blog.
Just published (February 2016) in the open access Journal of Orthopaedic Case Reports at the invitation of Editor-In-Chief Dr. Ashok Shyam: Editorial: open access, copyright and licensing: basics for open access publishers. Journal of Orthopaedic Case Reports 6:1 p. 1-2. DOI: 10.13107/jocr.2250-0685.360
This post is part of the Open Access and Creative Commons critique series.
Just published (February 2016) in the open access Journal of Orthopaedic Case Reports at the invitation of Editor-In-Chief Dr. Ashok Shyam: Editorial: open access, copyright and licensing: basics for open access publishers. Journal of Orthopaedic Case Reports 6:1 p. 1-2. DOI: 10.13107/jocr.2250-0685.360
This post is part of the Open Access and Creative Commons critique series.
The Elsevier website provides language illustrating clearly how author copyright can be virtually identical to a copyright transfer.
From the Elsevier Copyright page, under For Open Access Articles:
Authors sign an exclusive license agreement, where authors have copyright but license exclusive rights in their article to the publisher**. In this case authors have the right to:
**This includes the right for the publisher to make and authorize commercial use, please see the “Rights granted to Elsevier” tab for more details.
Comments
The copyright may be in the author’s name, but clearly the author has signed away all rights. The only rights that remain for the author are those “permitted to third parties”. The author has become a third party with respect to their own work.
Patent, trademark and other IP rights are not part of copyright. It is deceptive for Elsevier to post these here as if Elsevier had these rights to grant.
This post is part of the Creative Commons and Open Access Critique series.
The Elsevier website provides language illustrating clearly how author copyright can be virtually identical to a copyright transfer.
From the Elsevier Copyright page, under For Open Access Articles:
Authors sign an exclusive license agreement, where authors have copyright but license exclusive rights in their article to the publisher**. In this case authors have the right to:
**This includes the right for the publisher to make and authorize commercial use, please see the “Rights granted to Elsevier” tab for more details.
Comments
The copyright may be in the author’s name, but clearly the author has signed away all rights. The only rights that remain for the author are those “permitted to third parties”. The author has become a third party with respect to their own work.
Patent, trademark and other IP rights are not part of copyright. It is deceptive for Elsevier to post these here as if Elsevier had these rights to grant.
This post is part of the Creative Commons and Open Access Critique series.
mBIO has excellent language on their website http://mbio.asm.org/site/misc/authors.xhtml
explaining what they mean to exclude and include by using a CC noncommercial license. This could be model for others so copied in full below. The first part is copied directly from the CC website, a good practice which avoid errors in interpretation that would be possible with paraphrasing.
Noncommercial reuse is defined as use that is not intended for or directed toward commercial advantage. This would include the following:
Individuals seeking to obtain permission for commercial reuse of mBio journal content may do so through the Rightslink web-based permissions and commercial reprint system. To use Rightslink, on the mBio website search for the journal article containing the content which you would like to reuse and then click on the “Reprints and Permissions” link that appears on the journal table of contents or within the article content box.
This post is part of the Creative Commons and Open Access critique series.
mBIO has excellent language on their website http://mbio.asm.org/site/misc/authors.xhtml
explaining what they mean to exclude and include by using a CC noncommercial license. This could be model for others so copied in full below. The first part is copied directly from the CC website, a good practice which avoid errors in interpretation that would be possible with paraphrasing.
Noncommercial reuse is defined as use that is not intended for or directed toward commercial advantage. This would include the following:
Individuals seeking to obtain permission for commercial reuse of mBio journal content may do so through the Rightslink web-based permissions and commercial reprint system. To use Rightslink, on the mBio website search for the journal article containing the content which you would like to reuse and then click on the “Reprints and Permissions” link that appears on the journal table of contents or within the article content box.
This post is part of the Creative Commons and Open Access critique series.
The types of works that many students and faculty would like to be able to include in scholarly works are not necessarily from other scholarly works. For example, scholars in my doctoral discipline of communication study a wide range of types of works including newspapers, television, films, cartoons, advertising, blogs and social media, and public relations materials. It is very useful for scholars to be able to include images and text from the primary source materials, either as illustration or for purposes of critique. Obtaining permission to use even small excerpts of such works is time-consuming at best. I argue that it would be in the best interests of scholarship to advocate for strong fair use / fair dealing exceptions for research and academic critique globally and accept that more restrictive licenses may be necessary to avoid the potential for re-use errors that could easily occur with blanket licenses allowing broad re-use. For example, while it makes sense to allow scholars to include small movie stills in an academic piece, it could be quite problematic for scholars to include such items in works that grant blanket commercial and re-use rights downstream.
This illustrates what I see as one of the problems with the one size fits all CC-BY license preferred by some open access advocates (which I consider to be a serious error): what I interpret as an implicit assumption that all of the works scholars are likely to want to re-use are other scholarly works. Rather than making assumptions, let’s do some research to find out what scholars and students would like to be able to re-use. Anecdotally, in my experience the most popular items for re-use are images from popular culture (especially characters from the Simpsons TV series), not scholarly works. Scholarly journals like to use photos to add interest and aesthetic value. If it is the case that the greatest interest in re-use for scholars involves works from popular culture / outside the academy, then ubiquitous CC-BY licenses for absolutely every scholarly article, book, and dataset in the whole world would not solve the primary re-use question for a majority of scholars.
This is not meant to suggest that advocacy for global fair use / fair dealing rights for academic research and critique is an easy task, rather to raise the question of whether this is an appropriate and useful goal for scholarly works.
This post is part of the Creative Commons and Open Access Critique series.
This discussion on CC Mixter illustrates some common confusion about CC licenses, in this case CC-BY. The first commenter asks whether it is considered legal or ethical to take songs that have been licensed as CC-BY and compile them into an album to sell. These three commenters appear to agree that this is legal. The first commenter is not convinced that this is ethical. The second commenter suggests that while this might be legal, it would make a lot of artists mad as they likely did not understand the implications when licensing their work CC-BY. I bring up this piece of anecdotal evidence as this fits my own experience that people using CC-BY licenses do not necessarily understand the implications of doing this. I would also like to argue that the name “Creative Commons” is somewhat misleading as the cultural notion of a commons is more akin to a common resource or set of resources that is shared by a community in an equitable way, while the CC licenses facilitate exploitive as well as community use.
CC Mixter discussion: from http://ccmixter.org/thread/2659
First post
So I was having a discussion with someone regarding the CC licensing model and we came up with a situation which seems to be a bit of an ethical dilemma and I wanted to get the opinions of some musicians that create CC content.
So, this is specifically regarding CC-BY licensed work. The situation we were considering is someone compiling a bunch of CC-BY songs into a single album (a mix CD I guess you’d say) and selling that album (assuming they attribute the original artists as required by the license of course).
Now, based on the CC-BY license I am fairly certain that this is totally legal as there are no restrictions on what you can do with the music. The question is, is this ethical?
Comment by CC Mixter discussion participants
Commenter 1: “It is 100% ethical, because that is precisely what the license is for.
I strongly believe many people would be upset about it; but in most cases that would be because they didn’t understand the full implications of licensing their music as CC-BY in the first place (things like licenses being non revocable, for instance)”
Commenter 2: “Anytime I license something CC-BY, I assume that it will be used for profit by someone else. Sometimes I seek material that is CC-BY so I can add to it and possibly put it on an album… for personal profit”.
This post is part of the Open Access and Creative Commons critique series detailing my work-in-progress which is designed to explain important differences between open access per se and Creative Commons licenses which provide useful tools for open access but cannot be equated with open access.
The Chang vs. Virgin Mobile case illustrates some of the complexities behind the CC-BY license. A picture of a minor girl was posted to flickr with a CC-BY 2.0 license, and it was picked up and used by Virgin Mobile in an advertising campaign, without asking the permission of the photographer. The family was not pleased with this and fought this in court, against Virgin Mobile on several different grounds including copyright, privacy and publicity rights, and against Creative Commons for failing to warn against this possibility. The plaintiffs ultimately dismissed the case.
From my perspective, this case raises some issues to consider before deciding that a particular creative commons license is optimal for scholarship.
Summary and conclusion
Creative Commons licenses is the not the simple solution to scholarly copyright that some of us would like to see. There are good reasons for scholars to hesitate to grant some of the rights CC makes available, including derivative and commercial re-use, including ethical and legal consideration. As an open access activist, I am concerned that the push by some in the open access movement for a CC-BY / CC-BY-SA default license for open access is more harmful than helpful to open access. Unleashing the potential for creation of derivatives and commercial use will unleash negative as well as positive benefits. When this happens, scholars and policy-makers who believe that they have been misled about the benefits and downsides of particular CC license elements are likely to be just as unhappy as the young woman and her family in this case were. The purpose of my Open Access and Creative Commons critique series is to try to alert my colleagues in the open access movement about these dangers to open access per se.
The CC summary or this case can be found here. The CC wiki page for court decisions is here.
