[GOAL] Re: Fwd: [open-science] PeerLibrary is searching for volunteers

[Mitar]

Hi!

On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 10:47 AM, Heather Morrison
<Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca> wrote:
> My response: when I looked, the Mendeley logo was on the "about" page. Mitar
> on this list, who appears to be speaking on behalf of PeerLibrary, confirms
> this: "to satisfy their attribution requirement we put the logo on the about
> page". I submit that if a company's logo is included on the about page of a
> service, it is a reasonable assumption that the company is involved.

I think from CC attribution clause in CC licenses is it clear that
when you satisfy an attribution to somebody, this does not mean that
that somebody endorses you in any way. If you create a CC-BY licensed
work and I attribute you, this does not mean that you are endorsing or
having any influence on what I am doing.

I do see that PeerLibrary was pulled into some existing discussion
about CC-BY requirement and is now used as a pawn in this. Not sure
how that happened, I would just like to put out that:

- when you for the first time wrote to this list with your critique of
PeerLibrary, you didn't yet know that the logo is there for CC-BY
attribution reasons
- now that you learned about that, you are changing the story and
saying that this was the purpose of your e-mail from the very
beginning, and not the perceived connection with Mendeley

So please decide what you are stating. For me it feels like you are
trying to bash PeerLibrary no matter what. First it was perceived
connection with Mendeley, once that was cleared, now is CC-BY
attribution. Please take PeerLibrary out of such discussions.

But if you want to discuss it, then please inform first yourself. You
could read our terms of use:

https://peerlibrary.org/terms

If something, you would see that we are pushing for CC0 (for
annotations). We also point out the arguments for that (in academia,
we already have attribution clause, if you don't do it, it is called
plagiarism, there is no reason to also add legal requirements on top
of that, if our communities are already able to handle that by
ourselves). I would love discussion about that. What do you think
about it. Is this too strict, not a good idea, or do you think that
maybe we should try to get copyright out of the future content
produces by the community (what CC0 is trying to achieve), to prevent
such lock-ups as we are experiencing with closed access publishers
this days.

Additionally, it should be clear that CC-BY requirement is about
Mendeley API and data available there: metadata and annotations and
other data created by their users. Not about publications themselves.
Metadata probably cannot be copyrighted anyway and CC-BY does not
apply there. And for other content is probably their right to decide
how they want to license (whether we agree with that decision or not).

So putting a logo to attribute CC-BY use of an API we are planing to
use maybe has something with CC-BY license as a concept, but it has
nothing to do with CC-BY licensing or not of publications themselves.
This is completely unrelated and has no connection to what PeerLibrary
is and does. Not sure why was then brought in into this discussion
about CC-BY requirement.

I am interested in licensing questions and we can discuss them. But
let's be clear that this does not have much in connection with what
PeerLibrary is, does, and stands for. I would still welcome feedback
about PeerLibrary from this community.


Mitar

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