[GOAL] Re: Japan's National OA Mandate for ETDs.

[Heather Morrison]

Congratulations to Japan on its national mandate of ETDs!

In contrast with my colleague Peter Murray-Rust, I would not encourage  
the use of CC-BY as a default license for theses. One reason is that  
it is common (at least in Western countries), for students to go on to  
revise and submit either portions of a thesis or the entire thesis for  
re-publication as articles or books. These are often some of the first  
publications for new scholars and critical to obtaining tenure. For  
this reason, it will generally be in the best interest of the student  
to reserve the right to create derivatives and commercial use. In  
other words, CC-BY is usually not in the best interest of the new  
graduate. Not using CC-BY as a default is also in the best interests  
of scholarship as a whole, as this supports new scholars, and of the  
university per se, as the success of graduates reflects well on the  
university.

This will not be the case for every student, and so I would not  
recommend forbidding CC-BY, or any particular default as different  
students and disciplines have different needs. An expectation of open  
access (literature that is digital, online, free of charge and free of  
most licensing and copyright restrictions, as per Suber's short  
definition), with at most a modest embargo period to accommodate  
students' needs to obtain patents or protect confidentiality when  
these are required, is sufficient. It is useful to offer Creative  
Commons licenses, but no clear compelling reason to require their use.  
My recommendation is to offer the full range of CC licenses.

For scholars like Peter Murray-Rust that are interested in reusable  
data, my suggestion is to work with colleagues in your discipline to  
create a culture of data sharing. As PMR has noted elsewhere (citation  
would be appreciated), the image-based data contained in Public  
Library of Science journals are not useful for data and text-mining,  
in spite of the CC-BY license. That is, data-mining of pictures of  
graphs and charts is a poor method of reusing data compared to having  
the actual data to download in a format designed to facilitate reuse.

My work on the imperfect match of open access and creative commons  
licenses is posted or reference in my series, Creative Commons and  
Open Access Critique:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/10/critique-of-cc-by-series.html

In brief, my recommendation is against any default, but rather  
recognizes that we are in a period of experimentation and encouraging  
a variety of approaches.

best,

Dr. Heather Morrison
Freedom for scholarship in the internet age
http://summit.sfu.ca/item/12537



On 1-Apr-13, at 10:40 PM, jyogaku at mext.go.jp wrote:

> Dear Peter
>
> Thank you for your interest.
>
> In Japan, use of the licence is still at the individual level, the
> national-level assessment has just begun.
> (Currently, Copyright Act is only.)
>
> Best Regards
> SHUTO Makoto
>
> ====================
> SHUTO Makoto
>
> Cheif, Science Information Unit
> Office for Science Information Infrastructure
> Information Division, Research Promotion Bureau
> Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
> ====================
> 3.11 Japan's National OA Mandate Day!
>
>
>
> 送信元: Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>
> 宛先:   "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)"  
> <goal at eprints.org>,
>
> 日付:   2013/04/01 17:47
> 件名:   [GOAL] Re: Japan's National OA Mandate for ETDs.
> 送信者: goal-bounces at eprints.org
>
>
> Thanks you for this. It seems a welcome development. When the complete
> thesis is published is there an explicit licence (e.g. CC-BY) that  
> permits
> re-use consistent with the principles of BOAI?
>
> P.
>
> -- 
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
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