[GOAL] Re: RCUK Open Access Feedback

[Tim Brody]

On Sun, 2012-03-18 at 21:28 +0900, Andrew A. Adams wrote:
> David Prosser wrote:
> > Say I wanted to data mine 10,000 articles.  I'm at a university, but I am c=
> > o-funded by a pharmaceutical company and there is a possibility that the re=
> > search that I'm doing may result in a new drug discovery, which that compan=
> > y will want to take to market.  The 10,000 articles are all 'open access', =
> > but they are under CC-BY-NC-SA licenses.  What mechanism is there by which =
> > I can contact all 10,000 authors and gain permission for my research?
> 
> 
> The intent of CC-NC is that one cannot take the original material, re-mix it 
> (or even just as-is) and sell the resulting new work. It does not mean that 
> the information it contains cannot be used in a commercial setting, but that 
> the expression it contains cannot be used in a commercial setting. A simple 
> example is that a CC-NC licensed book cannot be recorded as an audio play 
> which is then sold. If one makes an audio book it must be available for free. 
> However, copies of a CC-NC book can be distributed to students who are paying 
> for a course in English literature as one of the books studied.

I don't understand this concern about 'NC' (non-commercial). I
understood that the "give-away open access literature" was given-away by
authors precisely because the motivation for publishing publicly funded
research is not for direct commercial gain. Instead, authors derive
impact from others reading and citing their work.

If a company were to create and sell an audio version of a research work
then that increases the author's impact. That doesn't preclude someone
else creating a "for-free" audio version, nor readers accessing the
original self-archived or gold-OA text version.

OA is not about anti-capitalism - if someone can take the "resource" (OA
research literature), add value and re-sell it (with suitable
attribution) then that can only be to the advantage of authors and
readers.

-- 
Tim Brody

School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Southampton
SO17 1BJ
United Kingdom

Email: tdb2 at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 490 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120319/5d1bd3a8/attachment.bin