[okfn-discuss] [open-science] Fwd: "Open Access" publications under CC-NC licences

Peter Murray-Rust pm286 at cam.ac.uk
Sat Dec 10 10:29:24 UTC 2011


I was sad to see a blogpost by Heather Morrison - an "open access advocate"
argue strongly for CC-NC-BY-SA rather than CC-BY for "Open Access"
articles.
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/dissension-in-open-access-ranks-on-cc.html
Heather asks for comment, but there is no online mechanism so I am replying
to her here. I'll just say that many of the assertions and arguments about
the value of CC-NC are flawed.

It would be extremely damaging if the non-openAccess community were to take
away the view that there are different strengths of OA and that anyone can
choose what they like. There is OA-gratis and OA-libre. Organisations like
SPARC have asserted that CC-BY is the effective licence for libre OA and
that CC-NC is not compliant.  CC-NC is not libre OA and cannot be redefined
to be so. (I don't have references - that's what this post is about).

Rather than rehearse the arguments against CC-NC in this post it is
critical that we assemble *rapidly* a compelling simple resource pack. If -
as Heather suggests - we have OA advocates arguing that the third world
should use CC-NC to protect the value of their contributions it will even
further damage the re-use of information.

It's possible that SPARC or other organizations have some documents, but we
are going to have to do this as a matter of urgency.





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