[GOAL] Re: CC-BY-NC (was: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with, profits - or too high a price?)

[Jan Velterop]

This seems like trading off the potential for minor revenues/royalties — even no more than hypothetical in most instances — against the benefit of unrestricted open access for science and scholarship.

In my view this amounts to "profit spite". With a CC-BY-NC licence, why would the OA publisher be exempted from the NC clause?

'Non-commercial' is terribly ambiguous (what's 'commercial', and how far downstream does it apply?), and for that reason subject to potential unintended infringement and the ©-trolling that comes with that. In effect, that means that due to sensible self-censorship, any re-use is best avoided. That in turn means that the article with a CC-BY-NC licence is not truly BOAI-compliant open access, but merely 'ocular access' instead. Unsatisfactory for modern research and scholarship.

Jan Velterop


On 29 Jan 2013, at 09:55, Editor Living Reviews wrote:

> 
> I'd just like to add the point of view of the Living Reviews OA journals 
> with an example why we currently argue in favor of CC-BY-NC.
> 
> First, since not only Marcin Wojnarski doubts that
> 
>> anyone want to pay for a paper which is elsewhere available for free?
> 
> Our long review articles would make perfect (text-)books if anyone could 
> sell them without asking for publisher's or the author's permission. 
> Example:
> 
> The open access review "The Post-Newtonian Approximation for 
> Relativistic Compact Binaries" (http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2007-2) 
> was republished by Oxford UP as a major part of "Equations of Motion in 
> General Relativity" 
> (http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199584109.001.0001) 
> in 2011.
> 
> Original price at amazon.com: $98.50 for 156 pages!
> 
> Of course, this example does not completely illustrate the possible 
> misuse of CC-BY: here, the author agreed to the commercial reprint, and 
> the original review was extended by other authors' contributions. 
> However, they could have easily sold only the Futamase part as a book.
> 
> With CC-BY, the publisher would not even have to ask the authors or 
> original OA publisher for reprint permission. Moreover, the authors (who 
> usually write time-consuming reviews in addition to their publicly 
> funded research) would not financially benefit from this commercial 
> reuse in any way. Therefore, our authors would object to Peter 
> Murray-Rust, who has
> 
>> never met a scientist who has argued for CC-NC over CC-BY.
> 
> In short, in a world where companies collate wikipedia articles and sell 
> them on amazon, why wouldn't there be a marked for commercial OA reprints?
> 
> (And, if someone wants to sell them, e.g., as book-on-demand, at least 
> it should be the OA publishers and authors themselves...)
> 
> 
> Frank
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> ======================================================
> Frank Schulz | Managing Editor
> Living Reviews BackOffice
> 
> MPI for Gravitational Physics
> (Albert Einstein Institute)
> Am Muehlenberg 1
> 14476 Potsdam | Germany
> 
> email: editorlr at aei.mpg.de
> tel: +49 (0)331 567 7115
> 
> http://www.livingreviews.org
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