So, I have a commentary published in Nature this month about the
importance of using a CC-BY license to achieve full open access. I
requested the article be made freely available as part of my agreement
with Nature, but they paywalled it anyway. It’s
freely
available now but not until after some embarrassing email and twitter
hassling.
I am not particularly mad at any of the parties involved. It just
points out the power of the default switch being closed, and how hard it
is, even when you’ve negotiated an agreement, to flip it to open. It
points out the weakness of the author in negotiation with the journal.
Maybe I’m the fool in the fool’s errand.
Also, in the search for brevity that print journals enforce, I
didn’t get to be as granular as I wanted. My quarrel is with the
publishing industry’s attempt to write a new license and I have no wish
to lump those with whom I have a philosophical disagreement with those
OA advocates who sincerely dislike CC BY, like Heather Morrison or many
in humanities, into the same pool.
Anyway. Below are references for key points I make in the
commentary.
1. Re: definitions of OA, see “Budapest Open Access
Initiative” at http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/openaccess,
accessed 03/13/13
2. Re: restrictions in licensing, see Elsevier’s published
contract with California Digital Libraries: ““Schedule 1.2(a) General
Terms and Conditions ”RESTRICTIONS ON USAGE OF THE LICENSED PRODUCTS/
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS” GTC1] “Subscriber shall not use spider
or web-crawling or other software programs, routines, robots or other
mechanized devices to continuously and automatically search and index
any content accessed online under this Agreement. ”” online at
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://orpheus-1.ucsd.edu/acq/license/cdlelsevier2004.pdf&usd=2&usg=ALhdy2_FmzOtI3JkKs-fJwirgig4WLA5fA,
accessed 03/13/13
3. Re: “CC Plus,” see various comments in lectures at “FACT
Seminar No. 1: Licensing in an Open Access Environment: legal
niceties, funder mandates and publishing challenges“ at
http://www.stm-assoc.org/events/fact-seminar-no-1/?presentations,
accessed 3/13/13
4. Re: CC BY, See “Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported”
(the “commons deed” with links to complete underlying license) at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/, accessed 3/13/13
5. Re: 70+ requirements, see “Public Policy Requirements,
Objectives and Appropriation Mandates” at
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/nihgps_2010/nihgps_ch4.htm,
accessed 3/13/13
6. Re: community defintions of open things, see “Open Knowledge
Definition” at http://opendefinition.org, accessed 03/13/13, and
“Open Source Definition (Annotated) at
http://opensource.org/osd-annotated, accessed 3/13/13
7. Re: license incompatibility, see “GPL-Incompatible Free
Software Licenses” at
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses
8. Re: decomposition of licensed elements and the CC licenseed Time
Photo of the Year, see “Trapped Underground,” a CC-BY photograph
of the London Bombing aftermath, available at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trapped_underground.jpg
accessed 3/13/13
9. Re: technical solutions to provenance, see “Source Attribution in
RDF,” http://www.w3.org/2001/12/attributions/ accessed 3/13/13