[GOAL] Re: CC-BY and - or versus - open access

[Jan Velterop]

Heather,

What possible motive could a publisher have to act according to the scenario you sketch? Spite? Some wicked pleasure in frustrating the hell out of his authors? They could go out of business, that's true. Oh, and repositories could be discontinued and closed, too, of course. How is this all different for CC-BY compared to CC-BY-NC, or even to Public Domain material? 

Most publishers that I know who publish with CC-BY also deposit the articles, often in more than one repositories. Authors can – and should – always deposit their articles and at least keep copies so that in the extremely unlikely event of their CC-BY articles not being available anywhere, not even from Mendeley, or LOCKKS, or national libraries, they could still deposit them. Scepticism regarding the benefits of CC-BY is wholly unwarranted in the context of open access. 

Jan Velterop

On 22 Aug 2012, at 18:28, Heather Morrison wrote:

> Thanks, Marc and Jan.
> 
> I'd like to repeat this for emphasis, from the CC-BY legal code thanks to Marc: "Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time".
> 
> Comment: a publisher can publish a work as CC-BY (which does not require open access), then change license terms or simply stop redistributing the work at any time. If someone has a copy of the work while distributed as CC-BY, then they can make this open access. However, this only works if someone does have a copy and the means and will to redistribute for open access. This is why a CC-BY licensed article disseminated via one (or preferably more) open access archives is a much more secure situation for open access than publishing CC-BY.
> 
> best,
> 
> Heather Morrison
> 
> On 2012-08-22, at 8:47 AM, Couture Marc wrote:
> 
>> Jan Velterop wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> a (c) licence can only ever be changed from less open/less liberal to 
>>> more open/more liberal; otherwise the user/reader can always claim to 
>>> have read/used/distributed under the previous licence or not being 
>>> aware of the new licence.
>>> 
>> 
>> I completely agree. And the user would not even have to claim ignorance of a new licence. As I pointed out before, CC licences' legal code states that they are "perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright)", and that should the copyright holder change the licence terms at some time, the original licence would remain in force:
>> 
>> "[...] Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such election will not serve to withdraw this License (or any other license that has been, or is required to be, granted under the terms of this License), and this License will continue in full force and effect unless terminated as stated above [i.e. in case of a breach of the terms of the licence by the user (section 7a)]."
>> 
>> (CC Attribution 3.0 Unported legal code, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode, section 7b).
>> 
>> Marc Couture
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> GOAL mailing list
>> GOAL at eprints.org
>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal