[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?

[Heather Morrison]

On 28-Jan-13, at 8:24 PM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:

Heather and I disagree profoundly on this. I have never met a  
scientist who has argued for CC-NC over CC-BY. There is a very strong  
case against CC-NC, with significant research into the issues (not  
just opinions) put by Hagedorn, Mietchen et al.  http://www.pensoft.net/journals/zookeys/article/2189/creative-commons-licenses-and-the-non-commercial-condition-implications-for-the-re-use-of-biodiversity-information 
.

Comment: I know how much you appreciate quantitative evidence, PMR, so  
here are some quick figures that suggest that scientists do very much  
want NC:

Nature's Scientific Reports provides an interesting case study. This  
journal is similar to PLoS ONE - except that they give authors their  
choice of CC licenses. I just checked the 8 journals on the front page  
of scientific reports, and here are the CC license choices of the  
scientists themselves:

CC-BY-NC-ND: 6/8 or 75%
CC-BY: 1/8 or 12.5%
CC-BY-SA: 1/8 or 12.5%

A larger study would be useful - anyone interested? This is one of the  
advantages of the leaving the choice in the hands of the author.

A quick glance at the DOAJ General Science list shows that about 20 of  
the 143 journals on this list use the NC element. This compares with  
about 19 journals on the same list using CC-BY.

This means that scholars on editorial boards who are making decisions  
about gold open access publishing in the area of science are looking  
at the CC options and deciding that it makes sense to use  
noncommercial. Note that the majority in this sub-list still are not  
using CC licenses at all.

To summarize: there is evidence that given a choice, scientists tend  
to prefer CC licenses including the noncommercial element.

best,

Heather Morrison, PhD
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com