[GOAL] Public domain and/or CC-BY facilitate toll access

[Heather Morrison]

Thank you for the clarification. Regardless of what Springer was doing a few years ago, CC-BY does grant blanket commercial rights to harvest and sell works, or portions of works such as images

Re: "the price of freedom is that someone should keep and advertise at least one copy of the original": this is an important point, but you need to add "free of charge", otherwise this could become a toll access service.

I argue that this is one of the reasons OA repositories are necessary to sustain OA. Publishers have no obligation to continue to exist or continue publishing, never mind an ongoing obligation to make works freely available on a perpetual basis.

best,

Heather Morrison


-------- Original message --------
From: Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>
Date: 2018-03-24 1:12 PM (GMT-05:00)
To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org>
Subject: Re: [GOAL] Public domain and/or CC-BY facilitate toll access



On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 1:56 PM, Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca<mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>> wrote:
This is a repeat of one argument I made last week to focus on one argument at a time.

Either public domain or CC-BY is consistent with, and facilitates, toll access, both by the original publisher and downstream.

To date the best examples I have seen of creative use of CC-BY for commercial profit-making are Elsevier's ability to incorporate such works into their toll access services such as Scopus and metadata sales, at no cost to Elsevier, and Springer's harvesting of images from CC-BY works for TA image bank (few years ago).

Assuming ths was the collection of images into "Springer Images" in 2012 this is not a correct record. I have documented this in considerable detail in my blog - there are many entries (e.g. https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/06/06/springergate-springerimages-for-today/ and entries on both sides).

Springer collected [all the?]  images in the articles thay had published over several years. They did this without regard to the licences or ownership or authorship. They stamped this "Copyright Springer". In thousands of case this was a direct violation of copyright. I challenged this and BiomedCentral (an open access publisher then recently acquired by Springer) had to sort the mess out.


US public domain to works created by federal employees works really well in areas where the US government itself posts the works online for free access. Published works that are public domain are often included in toll access packages. Not even PubMed has free access to all the works created by its own employees.

Public domain and Creative Commons are not necessarily "free of charge". Hence if free of charge is essential to a definition of open access, neither public domain nor CC are sufficient to achieve OA.

Material that is PD or CC BY (or CC BY-SA) can be copied without permission from the licensor and without charge. (There may be a charge for the materials involved in copying). Once someone has a copy of a PD or CC BY work they can copy it indefinitely without payment to the copyright holder. The only way that a licensor could prevent this free copying is not to make any copies available, ever.

The price of freedom is that someone should keep and advertise at least one copy of the original. If all copies happen to be lost (as may happen) then the work may effectively become "closed" .It is important, therefore, that copies are kept of all CC0/CC BY. If this is done then the work can never become closed (unless there is a retrospective change in the law or copyright, which we should fight).

CC BY gives the following rights. (from https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

You are free to:

  *   Share - copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
  *   Adapt - remix, transform, and build upon the material
  *   for any purpose, even commercially.
  *


<https://freedomdefined.org/>

  *   The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

An added request: when referring to CC licences please specify which. I frequently see "published under a CC licence". Some CC licences are very liberal and others very restrictive. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/


P.



best,

Heather Morrison

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--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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