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

Fri Jan 24 18:23:06 UTC 2014

On 2014-01-24, at 12:02 PM, Mike Taylor wrote:

But as always, the meta-answer is that by definition WE DON'T KNOW what people will come up with. So let's not start out by pre-emptively preventing them. Open up the information, and let a thousand flowers grow.

Comments:  this sounds lovely, but let's give some thought to the very real potential that the most common commercial re-use will be to set up RightsLink type of services which charge people for articles that people freely give away or paywalled educational packages. CC-BY permits such uses. 

Regarding the Lens example:
http://blog.pubchase.com/the-fake-open-access-scam/

This is a project of eLife. It's an interesting extension of publishing services, but note that publishers like Elsevier have been developing their services on a technical basis for some time without requiring CC-BY. If after 10 years' experience with CC-BY, thanks to PLoS, BioMedCentral, and Hindawi, this is the best example that people can come up with, I would argue that this presents a substantial lack of evidence for the benefits of CC-BY. 

I'm not sure who is responsible for Lens, but I do not believe that I (or any scholar) have any obligation to give the results of my work to them for their personal profit.This is in effect what CC-BY as part of a mandate policy requires. 

The argument that we don't know what might happen so let's open things up for experimentation can apply to licenses as well. If CC-BY advocates succeed in forcing everyone to use this license, we won't know what other creative and possibly better approaches to copyright / licensing for open access might emerge. This is one reason why I'm inclined to support the default OJS open access statement: "This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge" is perhaps the best approach for the time being - but note that I wouldn't support forcing or coercing anyone to use this approach.

best,

Heather Morrison