[Foundation-l] Re-use of scholarly content

Wed Oct 17 23:45:11 UTC 2007

On 10/17/07, Klaus Graf <klausgraf at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> There is a recent discussion about true "Open Access" which includes
> IMHO the permission of re-use. The most appropriate license for
> scholarly works is CC-BY which allows use esp. at Commons. See my
> comment on a PLoS Biology article at
>
> http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=read-response&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050285#r1904
>
> Klaus Graf

As an academic, my personal desire regarding "open access" journals is a lot
closer to CC-BY-ND-NC (with exceptions for excerpting/quoting).  I want my
work to be widely accessible to everyone, but I do have an expectation that
the material appear largely in the form that I published it.  The idea of
someone taking my academic papers, wiki-ing them up, and altering the
conclusions or the nuance of the text is something that I fear would
generally distort, rather than add to, the value of the scholarship.
Reputation is very important in academia, and authors are expected to stand
behind their body of work.  Creating full-fledged derivative versions risks
confusing the academic record.

That said, I don't object to people building on my work, quoting from it, or
taking figures/data for future publications.  But the new publications
should be largely new rather than largely derivative.  The normal growth and
exchange of data is consistent with fair use and the existing standards in
academia, so CC-BY-ND with the expectation of fair use is something I would
consider acceptable or a new license explicitly addressing limited reuse
could be constructed.  However, simply leaving it at CC-BY would probably
make me too uncomfortable to publish under.

The NC is less significant, but there is still an emotional reaction that if
I am paying page charges for publishing, as is common, then I shouldn't be
allowing others to independently resell my work.  Or put another way, the
commercial value of the publication should contribute to defraying the cost
of publication.  Scientists often don't have a lot of money, and so
essentially giving it away doesn't make a lot of sense.  Though I would
prefer NC, I would still consider publishing without that restriction,
unlike the case of ND above.

So I guess my ideal open access journal is one that would be free for
everyone to view, free to redistribute copies, and free to extract figures
and data for future (largely independent) publications.  However, I am very
uncomfortable with the notion of allowing people to publish altered versions
of the text that might misrepresent my work.  I am also uncomfortable,
though less so, with the notion of future people commerically profiting from
the publication in a way that doesn't put anything towards defraying the
cost of the publication.

-Robert Rohde