[okfn-br] Nature - Licence restrictions: A fool's errand

Quarta Março 27 23:47:38 UTC 2013

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v495/n7442/full/495440a.html Licence
restrictions: A fool's errand

   - by John Wilbanks<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v495/n7442/full/495440a.html#auth-1>

Nature  495, 440–441 (28 March 2013)  doi:10.1038/495440a Published
online 27 March 2013
Article tools

   - Download PDF<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v495/n7442/pdf/495440a.pdf>
   - Citation<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v495/n7442/ris/495440a.ris>
   - Reprints<https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?publisherName=NPGR&publication=Nature&title=Licence+restrictions%3A+A+fool%26%23x27%3Bs+errand&contentID=10.1038%2F495440a&volumeNum=495&issueNum=7442&numPages=2&pageNumbers=pp440-441&orderBeanReset=true&publicationDate=2013-03-27&author=John+Wilbanks>
   - Rights & permissions<https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?publisherName=NPG&publication=Nature&title=Licence+restrictions%3A+A+fool%26%23x27%3Bs+errand&contentID=10.1038%2F495440a&volumeNum=495&issueNum=7442&numPages=2&pageNumbers=pp440-441&publicationDate=2013-03-27&author=John+Wilbanks>
   - Metrics<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v495/n7442/495440a/metrics>

Objections to the Creative Commons attribution licence are straw men raised
by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible, warns John
Wilbanks.
Subject terms:

   - Communication<http://www.nature.com/nature/archive/subject.html?code=112>
   - Policy <http://www.nature.com/nature/archive/subject.html?code=453>
   - Publishing <http://www.nature.com/nature/archive/subject.html?code=479>
   - Research management<http://www.nature.com/nature/archive/subject.html?code=496>

Copyright licensing is a topic usually left to law review articles, or
obscure terms of service on websites, or agreements between publishers and
libraries. But it is an essential element of the move towards open access —
the free, immediate online availability of scholarly articles coupled with
the right to use them fully in the digital environment.

An article that is free to read is not necessarily open for all uses —
often, it cannot be reused for text mining or in derivative works, for
example. The permitted uses depend on the copyright licence used by the
author.

BRENDAN MONROE

In my view, for an article to be considered truely open access, it has to
meet the widely accepted definition in the Budapest Open Access Initiative
— a set of recommendations laid out by leaders of the open-access movement
in 2001. That is, users must be able to “read, download, copy, distribute,
print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for
indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful
purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those
inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint
on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this
domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work
and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

Traditional publishing licences tend to place restrictions on at least one
of these uses, and it isn't easy for a reader to figure out what those are.
If the reader is a computer, as is more and more prevalent, the
restrictions are a spanner in the works.

The use of the Creative Commons attribution licence (CC-BY) fulfils the
community definition of open access and avoids a future morass of articles
with murky legal provenance and concomitant unclear reuse possibilities.
CC-BY was launched in 2002, 2 years before I started a 7-year stint as head
of science initiatives at Creative Commons in Mountain View, California.

CC-BY has now come under attack from the International Association of
Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, which is discussing the
introduction of a licence that would implement some — but not all — of the
commonly accepted tenets of open access. At a conference run by the
association in January, this was referred to variously as a “new” licence
and even as “CC Plus”.

It is a bad idea. Here's why.
Tried and true

SOURCE: OPEN ACCESS SCHOLARLY PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION

Download PDF<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v495/n7442/pdf/495440a.pdf>

CC-BY is a liberal licence that allows any kind of use under copyright as
long as the author is credited in the manner in which he or she specifies.
It is more than a decade old, clear, well-tested and deeply established as
an effective open-access licence for both for-profit and non-profit
publishers (see 'Licence to share'). It has been translated into more than
50 languages and is legally enforceable around the world. No other
open-access licence can claim its power, standing and adoption.

Critics have lately dubbed CC-BY 'viral', and bridled against the idea of
research councils mandating its use as a way to implement open access for
the scholarly literature. 'Viral' can be read either in the cultural sense
— an article becoming wildly popular — or in the legal sense. The former is
desirable. The latter is false: CC-BY does not force derivative works to be
relicensed under the same terms.

Nor is it an unprecedented act for a funder to maximize its return on
investment by specifying that publications arising from its funds be
published under a liberal copyright licence. Taking money for research
comes with conditions: grants from the US National Institutes of Health,
for example, come with more than 70 such requirements, including
data-sharing plans, annual reports, ethics training and gender indicators.
That one of those conditions be intended to optimize a research article's
impact by enabling its reuse by other researchers, their robots or by
entrepreneurs, sits well within the funding tradition.

Any licence that is less open than CC-BY reserves the rights of the
copyright holder to control certain reuses, and that requires a legitimate
justification. If an article's publication costs have been covered by an
article-processing fee, then reserving rights is just a means of double
dipping.

Furthermore, funders who want the maximum impact are going to choose an
existing standard legal tool that is interoperable with the vast majority
of free culture and free software licences, not bet on a licence that might
not be. Licences that distinguish between kinds of reuse, or discriminate
against entrepreneurs, fail every definition of open access, open knowledge
and open source. Tiny details of drafting, intentional or not, often render
content under one licence legally incompatible with content under a
different one. An essential function of the limited set of Creative Commons
licences is to forestall the hobbling impact that licence proliferation has
on the network effect of open culture.

On my cynical days, I fear that this kind of hobbling is at the heart of a
strategy to create 'open-access' licences just for scholarly publishers.
These licences would reserve the most creative reuses for those who simply
serve as the midwives for content, not for those who might go on to create
works that can surprise, inform and delight. If we allow only a tiny set of
predicted reuses, those are, by definition, the only reuses we will get —
and they will benefit only the existing power players in scholarly
publishing.
Specious concerns

It is hard to precis all the specious concerns about why CC-BY will not
work for scholarly publishing. In brief, those opposing the licence often
claim that it: would allow others such as drug companies to sell works
downstream; implies author endorsement of shady overlay journals; would
require all the elements of an article to be freely licensed (including
photographs, music, modern art and, presumably, Hollywood films); and would
make attribution on text mining unwieldy.

THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING
A *Nature* special issue.
nature.com/scipublishing

CC-BY does indeed allow resale — of something that is already on the
Internet for free. Anyone who pays for an object under CC-BY is either
making a donation, or is paying a tax for being inept at searching the
Internet. And a few key elements of CC-BY make it possible to prevent
dastardly uses.

First, because attribution is up to the author and the journal, it is easy
to make sure that any copy — if someone is trying to make a shady business
of reprints, for instance — links back to the free version of the article.

Second, CC-BY does not grant publicity rights. That means that attribution
can be used to clearly disclaim endorsement without the tangles caused by
commercial restrictions. The attribution can carry a requested form of
citation, including the URL to the original, peer-reviewed, free and
branded copy of the article. Then, anyone wishing to reprint must also
reproduce that citation or be in violation of the copyright. It makes it
hard to imply endorsement or sell something when the object itself carries
the provenance, and links, to the free version in a trusted journal.

Similarly, publishers can communicate their desired attribution in a
text-mining context. Indeed, because a text miner is only extracting
'facts' from the text, those facts are by law not covered by copyright —
and thus not subject to the attribution requirement. Of course, from a
technical and scientific perspective, readers will always want to know the
provenance of a fact, and it is good practice to link back to the source.
Indeed, the idea of link-based provenance is built into the design of the
Semantic Web. It is a technical problem, not a legal one.

“When in doubt, use running code that someone else has already written.”

It is also easy to include in an article under a CC-BY licence items not
subject to the licence — images, musical notation and more. That simply
requires the rider “this article, unless otherwise noted, is available
under CC-BY”, and a note placed by the elements that are not available.
Thus, a photograph under a Creative Commons licence can be used as one of *
Time* magazine's Photos of the Year, for example, without rendering the
rest of the publication subject to the terms of the licence.

In sum, the debate over CC-BY is actually an attempt to reinterpret what
the 'open' in 'open access' means. There are parties who want open access
to be as closed as possible to protect their business models from change.

A licence that is designed just for publishers might feel safer, but it is
a fool's errand. CC-BY exists. It is used widely and is driving tens of
millions of dollars in annual revenue for scholarly publishers such as
BioMed Central, Hindawi and the Public Library of Science. It fulfils the
community definitions of openness. And it works with the vast web of
existing free content. For any new licence to achieve all that, it would
need to be CC-BY.

It is encouraging that the open-access debate has moved from 'should we?'
to 'how do we?', and that we're talking about the issue even in this august
publication. It would be deeply sad if we were to fail now to draw on one
of the basic lessons of the open movements that have come before: when in
doubt, use running code that someone else has already written.
 Author information

   - Author information
   - Related links<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v495/n7442/full/495440a.html#link-groups>

Affiliations

   1. John Wilbanks is the chief commons officer at Sage Bionetworks in
   Seattle, Washington.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to:

   - John Wilbanks<http://www.nature.com/nature/foxtrot/svc/authoremailform?doi=10.1038/495440a&file=/nature/journal/v495/n7442/full/495440a.html&title=Licence+restrictions%3A+A+fool%26%23x27%3Bs+errand&author=John+Wilbanks>
-------------- Próxima Parte ----------
Um anexo em HTML foi limpo...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-br/attachments/20130327/ddb37e7a/attachment-0002.html>