[GOAL] Re: CC-BY and open access question: who is the Licensor?

[Heather Morrison]

On 2015-04-10, at 5:04 PM, Graham Triggs wrote:

But practically, that is of little concern. You can stop publishing something with a CC license, but you can't revoke it. Anyone that has the work acquired under a CC license, who has done nothing to invalidate the CC license, can with proper attribution redistribute / republish that work [and perpetuate the license]. And as long as it can't be proven that the work was not acquired and used legally under a CC license (or rather, you can prove that the work was issued under a CC licence at some point, that we work in question corresponds to that CC licensed version, and that this has all been done legally in accordance with that CC licence) then there isn't anything that anybody can do about it.

Comments: 

I have explained my background, and it would be helpful if Graham would explain his as well. For example, you have clarified that with PLOS CC licenses, PLOS is the licensor. Is this your interpretation, or are you a spokesperson for PLOS? Are you an academic, or an employee of a company seeking to profit from commercial use of academic works?

Agreed, CC licenses are not revocable. This works well for the individual licensee who has a copy of a particular work. If you want to be sure of ongoing access to all of the CC licensed works, either you have to make a copy of all such works or we need repositories with a long-term commitment to public access. The public access repository solution can work for everyone; it's what I recommend. 

It is good advice for downstream users to retain evidence of the license terms permitting re-use. Note that this is tricker than one might think. For example, the article my group published earlier this year in MDPI's Publications is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA - but if you find this through DOAJ you'll first come across the DOAJ indication of a journal-level CC-BY license and then click through to the article which is incorrectly labelled as CC-BY. 

DOAJ lists many journals as CC-BY, however one should note that these journals may include works or portions of works that are not licensed CC-BY, including third party content and works that were published before the journal switched to a CC-BY default, unless the journal went through a license revision process with previous works. This could be a significant amount of work unless the journal was very small.

Note that this is only one of the objections to CC-BY. In addition to my work, the RCUK implementation review document points to a number of concerns brought up by various people. I haven't gone through all the evidence to come up with a report at this time, but would note that RCUK reports that they were hearing substantive, principled objections. One such objection is academic freedom; if authors are restricted to publishing material that can be made available for blanket commercial use and re-use, this restricts what academics are able to publish. Some academics expressed concern that CC-BY would open up the possibility that their work would be sold or re-used in ways that they would not approve of. The report seems to brush off these concerns as a misinterpretation of the CC-BY license, however I think these concerns are quite realistic. As evidence, I would note that the current CC-BY license gives licensors the authority to insist that downstream users do NOT use attribution. This suggests that CC received complaints from licensors whose works were used in ways that the licensor did not want to be associated with. If a blanket license is granted, a downstream user would have to be psychic to know what kinds of commercial uses or re-uses might be acceptable or offensive to the original author. I am using author, not licensor, here on purpose; if an author publishes with PLOS as the licensor, it is important that the author's rights be respected even if PLOS is the licensor.  

The individual creator issuing their own work under a CC license and the more complex relationship of authors and publishers are very different matters. Hence, it does make sense to talk about publishers using CC licenses. 

The RCUK policy review document can be found here:
http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/04/10/who-is-served-by-for-profit-gold-open-access-publishing-a-case-study-of-hindawi-and-egypt/

best,

-- 
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca