[GOAL] Re: [sparc-oaforum] IOP Publishing moves to CC-BY licence for open access articles and bibliographic metadata

[Couture Marc]

On IOP's decision to use a CC-BY licence also for its metadata, Marcin Wojnaraski wrote:

>
> Bibliographic metadata are just statements of facts (person X published paper 
> Y ...) - that's nothing that could be copyrighted.
>

Well, the situation is more complex than that, and it depends in a critical way upon the jurisdiction considered. Even without considering abstracts, bibliographic metadata may contain more than "statements of facts", for instance, keywords and identifiers added by a third party, which must use "skills and judgement" if these are to say something useful about the work. In Canada, this may be sufficient for copyright protection. And in the EU, facts may be copyrightable (indirectly) under the database protection regime.

A good, succinct overview of this question, with references, may be found here:
http://www.k4all.ca/planning-research/legal-issues/copyright-journal-article-metadata

>
> Even if an abstract is included, it still comprises no more than 5% of the work 
> and can be freely used under "fair use" principle,
>

Here again, things are a little bit more complicated. As courts have clearly and repeatedly stated, there is no magic number or "rule of thumb" as to what proportion of the work involved in the use would automatically make it fair. Furthermore, this criterion is only one of several used to assess the "fairness"; one must also consider, for instance, the extent of the use: are we talking of making a single copy for personal use, or of posting a copy on a public website?

So, IOP's move to attach a CC-BY licence to its metadata eliminate the need to consider all these complex and often muddy issues.

Marc Couture