<blockquote class="history_container" type="cite" style="border-left-style:solid;border-width:1px; margin-top:20px; margin-left:0px;padding-left:10px;"><p style="color: #AAAAAA; margin-top: 10px;">On 08/04/2015 18:27:24, David Prosser <david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk> wrote:</p>Once the paper has been offered under a CC-BY license that license is ‘irrevocable’. Does ‘irrevocable’ not mean what I think it does? Further, also under Scope: </blockquote><div style="margin-top: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px">If you think that 'irrevocable' means that the copyright holder is not able to stop distributing it under CC-BY, and then distributing under another license, then no, that is not what it means.</div><div style="margin-top: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px">It means that you can not remove any rights acquired by someone that has been given to them by the CC-BY licence which was granted to them at the time they retrieved the paper.</div><div style="margin-top: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px">So - e.g. Elsevier - could change the licence on papers served by their website, and that would affect anyone obtaining it from the website after that point. But they could not do anything to restrict the rights of anyone that has already downloaded the paper under a CC-BY licence (which would include redistribution, including with the same licence for further users).</div><div style="margin-top: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px"><br></div><div style="margin-top: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px">re: No downstream restrictions.</div><div style="margin-top: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px">Here, it does not prevent anyone re-issuing the paper that they have acquired with different licence terms - you would need an -SA variant to do that.</div><div style="margin-top: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px">What it says is that when offering the paper under CC-BY you can't add barriers that prevent the person acquiring the paper from being able to exercise all the rights afforded to them under CC-BY.</div><div style="margin-top: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px">If you take the example of ReadCube read access links - you could not issue a (version of the) paper with a CC-BY licence within a print / copy restricted reader. But you could take a CC-BY paper - that would be a technological restriction. But you could take the CC-BY paper and re-issue it under a different licence within a restricted reader; providing that it wasn't e.g. CC-BY-SA licence.</div><div style="margin-top: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px">G</div><blockquote class="history_container" type="cite" style="border-left-style:solid;border-width:1px; margin-top:20px; margin-left:0px;padding-left:10px;"></blockquote>