[GOAL] Re: [sparc-oaforum] RE: CC-BY: derivatives and liability

Mon Aug 20 21:42:05 BST 2012

Matt,

This DOES help, but note that it is the combination of BMC's good practices - author copyright retention (not a given with CC licenses), publishing at least research articles as open access, archiving in PubMedCentral, and working cooperatively with institutional repositories for cross-deposit (where the IR is willing to work with BMC) that makes this a set of good practices - at least at the article level.

CC-BY on its own does not require any of these other practices.

It is worth noting that even a journal and publishing with all of these good OA practices above and beyond publishing research articles OA and CC-BY, is not sufficient to have a journal listed in DOAJ. Nor is it necessarily a reason for an institution to support the article processing fees, as the subscription content needs to be taken into account when making such decisions.

On another note, thanks once again to you & to BioMedCentral for your leadership in the open access arena. 

best,

Heather

On 2012-08-20, at 1:31 PM, Matthew Cockerill wrote:

> Genome Biology's policy, consistent with other BioMed Central journals, is that all research articles are 100% open access.
> Genome Biology also includes commissioned front-matter, reviews etc which are available to subscribers.
> 
> This is not an optional OA or hybrid model (in the sense that hybrid OA is generally used). 
> But it is the same "OA to research" model used by, for example, the BMJ.
> 
> See http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/access for more info.
> 
> The Bethesda statement was very clear in its focus  - it set out to define "a standard for publication of peer-reviewed reports of original research in the biomedical sciences"
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm
> 
> In doing this, it allowed for the fact that other types of content (text books, review journals etc) might need to use other models.  Funders have proven willing to pay to ensure that the research they have funded  is openly communicated, but will not necessarily wish to cover the costs of publication for review articles.
> 
> In terms of long term accessibility, one of the criteria for the Bethesda statement definition of OA is:
> "A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository)."
> 
> BioMed Central has always deposited copies of all the OA articles we publish in PubMed Central (and in other international open access repositories), thus guaranteeing the long term accessibility of those articles without any additional action being required by the author.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> Matt
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Heather Morrison [mailto:hgmorris at sfu.ca] 
> Sent: Monday, August 20, 2012 9:00 PM
> To: Matthew Cockerill
> Cc: 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: Re: [sparc-oaforum] RE: [GOAL] CC-BY: derivatives and liability
> 
> hi Matthew,
> 
> Many thanks for posting this, it is good to know that CC-BY publishers do include exerpts that are not necessarily CC-BY.
> 
> Now that you've raised the subject, I have a question about BioMedCentral. I have tended to assume that BMC was an open access publisher, and have often referred to BMC as exemplary in this regard. However, I just went to Genome Biology, a highly regarded BMC "open access journal", and noted to my surprise that Genome Biology is actually a hybrid OA / subscription journal. Looking at your "most viewed" articles, 3 of the top 5 are subscription only. I am glad to see that Genome Biology is not included in the Directory of Open Access Journals!
> 
> My reading of the Genome Biology CC-BY license is that there is nothing that would stop BMC's owner, Springer, from making this a subscription-only journal in future. I would never suggest that this is what you or BMC are intending for the future, or even Springer for that matter, however journals do change hands, and publishers change both owners and managers over time.
> 
> Would you agree that authors publishing in Genome Biology should make their articles OA in both their institutional repository and PubMedCentral, to ensure that their work remains open access into the future?
> 
> best,
> 
> Heather Morrison
> 
> On 2012-08-20, at 11:35 AM, Matthew Cockerill wrote:
> 
>> "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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