[GOAL] Re: COAR-recting the record

[Heather Morrison]

On 2015-05-27, at 12:37 PM, Kathleen Shearer wrote:
> 
> Elsevier’s new policy also requires that accepted manuscripts posted in open access repositories bear a CC-BY-NC-ND license. This type of license severely limits the re-use potential of publicly funded research. ND restricts the use of derivatives, yet derivative use is fundamental to the way in which scholarly research builds on previous findings, for example by re-using a part of an article (with attribution) in educational material.

Comments:

Creative Commons has existed for about 10 years. Scholars have been building on previous findings for millenia. In the past few centuries, scholarship has flourished in building on the results of previous findings in a largely All Rights Reserved environment. 

Education is an important public good, and related to scholarly research. Scholars need education before they can research. However, they are not the same thing. The open movements - open education, open government, open source, open data and open access - each involve different groups with different interests. It is, in my opinion, an error to conflate these movements. For example, commercial use when applied to open education could mean a democratization of knowledge - or a transfer of public goods to private educational institutions that could threaten the public institutions that produce the work in the first place. 

There are valid scholarly reasons for not allowing derivative and commercial use, including:

Third party works. Scholars often use third party works, with permission, in their articles and books. In doing so, they do not acquire copyright; this remains with the original copyright holder. Scholars and scholarly societies noted that the RCUK preference for CC-BY was problematic with respect to third party works:
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/2014review/

Even if these portions of works have appropriate copyright limitations, if people assume that a CC-BY article or journal means that all the work is CC-BY, this is a problem for the authors.

Some of the work included in scholarly journals is by or of research subjects who have their own rights, for example privacy and sometimes copyright. I argue that it is generally not ethical to release such works under terms of blanket downstream commercial and re-use rights. Lessig's blog post on the Chang v. Virgin Mobile case should be required reading for anyone promoting CC licenses for scholarly works:
http://www.lessig.org/2007/09/on-the-texas-suit-against-virg/

The CC license site says this about CC-BY: This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work," (from:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/)

Build upon is the tradition in scholarship (even with All Rights Reserved), and distribute seems fairly obvious for scholars wishing to share their work. However, it is not clear that scholars themselves wish to grant rights to remix and tweak their work. Scholarly careers are built on reputation. A poor downstream remix or tweak can reflect badly on the original scholar. Some scholars are happy to participate in this experiment, but many are not. 

I am not supporting Elsevier (still participating in the boycott), however I think Elsevier may be closer to the author perspective on this than either COAR or SPARC. 

best,

Heather Morrison