[GOAL] Re: CC-BY: derivatives and liability

[Matthew Cockerill]

"This just one example of a situation where allowing derivatives may not be clearly beneficial. Others include situations where an author is using someone else's work and the someone else does not allow derivatives. It is often the case with book publishing that excerpts are taken from various places with a variety of rights attached. In this case, a policy requiring CC-BY places limitations on what an author can use in their work."

If the author does not allow derivatives, then you can't incorporate their work into your own without asking for special permission.
If you are going to ask for permission, you can ask for permission to make your derived use of the excerpt CC-BY. 

If need be (in cases where the author you want to reuse is unwilling or unable to allow CC-BY relicensing of the excerpt, but will allow you your particular reuse) you can make your own work CC-BY as a whole,  but with the excerpt annotated to indicate both its attribution (which is of course needed anyway) and that it (unlike the main body of your work) is under a CC-BY-ND license.

Licensing exceptions like this are routinely annotated within works ( both OA and non-OA publishers do this - it is very common to see a figure legend noting that copyright lies with another publisher).

It would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to put it mildly,  to block derivative in general, just to deal with this minor edge-case.

Matt Cockerill,
Managing Director, BioMed Central


-----Original Message-----
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison
Sent: Monday, August 20, 2012 7:07 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci); SPARC Open Access Forum; open-science; scholcomm at ala.org T.F.; cc-community at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [GOAL] CC-BY: derivatives and liability

Another question relating to policies requiring CC-BY licenses: will policy-makers require waiver of liability in the case of derivatives?

As an example of why this might be necessary: consider the scenario of a research article in the area of pharmacology. Someone creates a derivative - but makes a mistake on the dose. People die. 

Before we create and implement policies requiring that all scholars make their works available for re-use, in my opinion it would be wise to give considerable thought to whether there are good reasons why scholars may not always want to (or be able to) allow derivatives of their works.

This just one example of a situation where allowing derivatives may not be clearly beneficial. Others include situations where an author is using someone else's work and the someone else does not allow derivatives. It is often the case with book publishing that excerpts are taken from various places with a variety of rights attached. In this case, a policy requiring CC-BY places limitations on what an author can use in their work.

Note that I am in favor of libre OA, just convinced that this cannot be achieved by universal adoption of one particular CC license.

Heather Morrison, MLIS
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com





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