[GOAL] CC-BY journal draft policy: possibly of interest

[Heather Morrison]

The Journal of Orthopaedic Case Reports has posted a Proposed Creative Commons notice which may be useful for discussion purposes.

My perspective is that it is helpful to have this explanatory information, good to see clarification of author copyright retention and active encouragement for authors to re-use their own works. However, the explanation of what CC-BY does is not accurate as it fails to explain that the license grants blanket commercial and re-use rights to anyone downstream. How would an author know that they could be opening up their work (or third party work) to the kind of commercial exploitation we saw in the Chang vs. Virgin Mobile case? (http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2014/02/chang-vs-virgin-mobile.html)

The journal links to the CC-BY deed, but not to the quick explanation for authors or the legal code. Whether CC-BY is a good idea for open access is a separate question; my argument is that it is not http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/10/critique-of-cc-by-series.html


Proposed Policy for Journal of Orthopaedic Case Reports
from:
http://jocr.co.in/index.php?journal=jocr&page=about&op=submissions#authorGuidelines



Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

	• Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

	• Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

	• Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

I am noting some of the copyright-related issues spotted during the 2015 OA APC data gathering process, including instances of OA APC charging journals with copyright transfer agreements. There are journals with CC-BY licenses requiring full copyright transfer and limiting author rights. Details here: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2015/05/open-access-publishing-current-issues.html

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