[Open-access] [open-science] Nature Scientific Data platform and doing science with open data

Fri Apr 5 22:48:16 UTC 2013

On 2013-04-05, at 3:08 PM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:

The author is given strong financial incentive to choose the NC option. as the -BY option is more expensive There seems to be no justification for this other than commercial interests of Nature. If tthe scientific community (Wellcome, NIH, NSF, RCUK, etc.) is arguing for CC-BY then it's irresponsible (at best) for NPG to do otherwise.

Comment:

The Wellcome Trust, NIH, NSF, RCUK, etc., is the funding agency community, not the scientific community. There are some scientists arguing for CC-BY, but what little evidence we have on this suggests that the majority prefer more restrictive licenses - details and links here:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/04/attitudes-and-values-regarding.html

This is not to say that I support NPG on this. The license should be the author's, not the publishers, in my opinion. In other words, NC should mean "no blanket commercial rights granted to any third party", not "commercial rights reserved by NPG". Requests for commercial uses should go to the author, not the publisher, with "commercial" understood to be limited to resale of the content of the work per se. For example, if someone pays to print an article they might well pay for the printing service. This is not commercial use if no royalty is collected for the work.

Because the Nature 6-month embargo is sufficient to meet the terms of OA policies, my suggestion to NPG would be to offer authors the choice of any CC license, not make any distinction in price, and encourage authors to rely on the green method to participate.

best,

Heather Morrison
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com