[Open-access] [open-science] Open Science Anthology published

Tue Jan 28 11:17:38 UTC 2014

On 27 January 2014 23:22, Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>wrote:

> 1. Proactive encouragement of creation of derivatives (otherwise why use
> these licenses?). If these licenses have any effect at all, they will
> result in the creation of more derivatives. It seems logical that this will
> increase the likelihood of both positive and negative derivatives; this
> means greater potential for misquotes.
>

The proactive encouragement of positive derivatives would seem to be a good
thing.

As for negative derivatives, it still comes back to:

1) Any derivative that does not note that it is a derivative, and does not
note changes (which might be negative) is breaking the terms of the CC-BY
license.

2) Any derivative should also be subject to peer / editorial review in
publication. Allowing a negative derivative at that point would be a fault
of review (not of the original or derivative author).

3) If you trust a known derivative without knowing that it has been
checked, and without checking the source yourself, then that is a fault of
the reader.

You gave an example of "what if the wrong dosage is stated". Well, there
are far more problems that are created in health care by non- or restricted
disclosure of information than could ever be caused by "harmful"
derivatives.

Doctors know how to read literature. What they don't always have is access
to the literature, or effective ways to search it. It can easily be argued
that failing to require CC-BY is leading to more wrongful deaths than
incorrect derivatives which can be checked, rejected and refuted ever could.

> For this reason, I argue that if scholars perceive greater risks than
> potential benefits from allowing derivatives, they should not be required
> to use CC derivative licenses.
>

And I argue that scholar perception has nothing to do with it. If you are
funding the research, then you have every right to expect that the scholar
publishes in a certain way (e.g. deposit in a repository). And if you are
funding the publication (that is, you are paying the APC) then you have
every right to demand a license that maximizes the value of that
publication.

Nobody is going to continue to demand CC-BY licenses if the risks do
outweigh the benefits. But we can't be paralyzed by inactivity - there are
over 700,000 articles in the Open Access subset of PubMed Central alone,
accumulated over almost 15 years. Has there been any discernible harm from
incorrect derivatives caused by this yet?

G
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