[okfn-discuss] [open-science] SPARC author addendum uses CC-NC licence and now all hybrid publishers have followed

Sun Dec 11 18:53:50 UTC 2011

On 11/12/11 17:58, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>
> Text-and data mining in science - AND creation of derivative works -
> is only possible with CC-BY articles.

Or BY-SA. Or the Open Data Commons licences. Or any other Free licence.

> In Open Source community (and many of those don't have permanent jobs)
> it's standard to use BSD-like licences. There is only one group using
> GPL (SA-like) and that's because they have inherited it. They hate it
> and are actively working to rewrite the whole system.

The GPL is the most widely used Free Software licence.

> Almost all education is commercial. Student pay fees - that is a 
> commercial transaction. Do not confuse "commercial" with "non-profit"
> or attempt to read the motivation of the author. The last two are 
> irrelevant in most jurisdictions.

Absolutely. It is immoral for fee charging educational institutions to
ask for rights that those who bankrupt themselves in order to pay those
fees will not later be able to exercise.

> My analysis is that SA will primarily act to reduce the size of the
> downstream activity,

This certainly hasn't been the case in Free Software.

> I have sympathy with this, having tried to use licences myself to 
> control such derivatives and moved away from this approach. Licences
> are too imprecise to control downstream use. In the case you
> mention, certification is an appropriate mechanism. A community
> creates norms of practice and requires practioners to use particular
> artifacts.

Absolutely. And modified versions must be marked as such under the terms
of the CC licences anyway.

- Rob.