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Reading the RCUK policy implementation review report raises this question for me: when authors publish works as CC-BY, who is the Licensor? In a license, the Licensor is the party granting the license, while the party benefiting from the license is the licensee.
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<div>In the case of scholarly articles published as gold open access, the Licensor could be the author, the publisher, both, or others (a Licensor can grant licensing and sub-licensing rights to others). The Licensor can be different from the party in whose
name the copyright is held. This is common in the traditional scholarly publishing practice of license-to-publish (author holds the copyright, but grants to the publisher the license to publish; a variety of sub-rights may be transferred or retained by the
author or shared between author and publisher). </div>
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<div>One of the Recommendations from the RUCK view document suggests that Public Library of Science (PLOS) is in effect is acting as if it is the Licensor, and working with the other publishers as if they were as well. This is assuming that this recommendation
accurately reflects the PLOS viewpoint (clarification on this from PLOS and/or RCUK would be appreciated). Here is the quote from the RCUK policy implementation review (p. 28): 4.1 "There may be an opportunity for RCUK to learn from the experience of PLOS,
and other work in this area, in working with publishers to make non-CC-BY content on other publisher platforms available under CC-BY licence". from: <a href="http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/RCUK-prod/assets/documents/documents/Openaccessreport.pdf">http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/RCUK-prod/assets/documents/documents/Openaccessreport.pdf</a></div>
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<div>If you look at PLOS journals, you will see that the copyright is in the name of the author. However, the PLOS Open Access site says: "PLOS applies the
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license</a> to works we publish." If the license is applied by PLOS rather than by the author, does this not suggest that it is PLOS and not the author that is the Licensor?</div>
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<div>Two reasons why this is important:</div>
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<div>1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>If other publishers are making works available to PLOS under CC-BY licenses, do they have the right to do so? It has happened with works and initiatives that I have been involved with more
than once that works that were released under other licenses were switched by someone to CC-BY licenses without the knowledge or permission of the proper rights-holders. This is not an ethical practice, and there are legal and relationship risks for people
and organizations that do this. Even publishers that fully own copyright may not have the right to grant blanket commercial and re-use rights downstream; the original author, for a variety of reasons, may not have had such rights to grant.</div>
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<div>2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>When the publisher is the Licensor, note that a CC Licensor has no obligation whatsoever to continue to make the work available at all, never mind for free or under the same license conditions.
A publisher CC-BY licensor is fully within their rights to switch these works to toll access, change the license and/or to sell their business to another entity that prefers a toll access model (unless there is a separate contract with the author that forbids
this). Note (again) that author copyright retention can co-exist with a publisher having rights as a Licensor.</div>
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<div>My subjective and anecdotal impression, albeit based on looking at what publishers and authors and doing and saying with their CC licenses over the years, is that there is considerable confusion about who the Licensor is. </div>
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<div>best,</div>
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<div>-- <br>
Dr. Heather Morrison<br>
Assistant Professor<br>
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies<br>
University of Ottawa</div>
<div>Desmarais 111-02</div>
<div>613-562-5800 ext. 7634</div>
<div>Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: Open Access Scholarship</div>
<div><a href="http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/">http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/</a><br>
<a href="http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html">http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html</a><br>
<a href="mailto:Heather.Morrison@uottawa.ca">Heather.Morrison@uottawa.ca</a><br>
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