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

[Heather Morrison]

CC-BY makes the RightsLink type of service far more likely by explicitly permitting commercial uses. 

As for this being a low-profit enterprise, note that scholarly publishing is a multi-billion dollar industry with some of the largest publishers bringing in 30-40% profit margins. 

Do companies pursuing profit necessarily care about the approval of scholars? Note that "e" in Elsevier has been translated as evil by many scholars and the librarians who pay the subscriptions for decades - this has had absolutely no impact on the bottom line.  The "cost of knowledge" Elsevier boycott got their attention a little (and a bit of change in the area of mathematics), but no impact on profits. Ultimately a corporation reports to its shareholders, not scholars or readers. All else being equal I'm sure they would prefer that we like them too, but when the two values are in conflict (scholar approval and maximum profit), they are legally required to prioritize profit. That's how publicly traded corporations work. 

best,

Heather Morrison

On 2014-01-24, at 1:04 PM, Emanuil Tolev wrote:

> Hi Heather,
> 
> You are completely correct in saying that something like the RightsLink mess is not legally preventable if everything is licensed CC-BY en-masse.
> 
> But then there are 3 issues of practical importance that merit consideration:
> 
> 1/ Can we enforce our legal rights even if we chose a different license for our scholarly works?
> In short, I believe that the answer to this is "no". You're not going to sue RightsLink on your own, because you have things which are actually worthwhile to focus on, such as the actual work which underlies the outputs you produce.
> 
> A group of people might be able to do it. But this requires significant time to be sunk into organisation and even persuading others to back you. Again, this is a problem of resources in practice.
> 
> What actually prevents businesses from doing what RightsLink is doing is the immense reputation damage which this will cause. If they are a new company (start-up size) in the scholarly or more narrowly, the OA sector, they may be destroyed completely! Nobody with enough knowledge about Open Access would invest time or money in such a high-risk, low-profit enterprise.
> Also, as this paragraph implies, I do think that RightsLink will either be fixed or go down, once the costs of running what's almost a scam outgrow the profit.
> 
> 2/ What else did we just prevent?
> We've tread on this topic enough in this tread. We don't know what downstream restrictions might prevent, regardless of whether they're NC, ND or even SA-style (or any other type). I don't really think that scholars can enumerate the sensible ways (commercial and otherwise) in which their work can be used, or that they would care to try. Research to do, papers to write, etc.
> 
> 3/ Does it matter that things like RightsLink can sell Open Access materials for exorbitant sums of money?
> 
> No, not at all. If we, as a community of people interested in the progress of scholarship, dislike what RightsLink are doing we shouldn't *just* point a finger and condemn them (though that's also not bad). We should come up with an equally good way of distributing OA articles!
> 
> * * *
> 
> We have to ask "why are they able to do this?", not "how can we stop them from doing this?". Well, why are they able to do this? They have a big audience. They have thousands of scholars checking pages on which RightsLink is promoted every DAY. Money has been poured into the software development, hosting and integration of that service with a variety of systems that really large publishers hold. As a consequence, they can do whatever they like!
> 
> But distributing OA articles and making them discoverable costs money and time + big publishing houses may be quite unhelpful. Presumably RightsLink requires quite a bit of metadata to operate. I don't think they'll hand this over to the OA community (just yet) - yet they are doing exactly that with RightsLink. So if we want to build this better alternative to RightsLink, we may need even MORE resources than them, because the publishers will be unhelpful.
> 
> Where should those resources come from? We could charge readers directly .. for OA content .. which would be doing the same as RightsLink.
> Hmmm. Not very appealing.
> 
> We could also think about taking a gradual approach:
> 1/ Think about what such a system will involve.
> 2/ Think about current sources of data and papers (Open University CORE system, institutional repositories and lists of such repositories, the DOAJ...).
> 3/ Build proof of concept tools which perform small parts of the work. E.g. http://howopenisit.org/ is kinda like RightsLink in the sense that it tries to tell you what the license of an article is, except that PLoS funded the initial development and the hosting and now it's free to use, though it has severe problems with identifying article licenses. It's getting improved next month.
> 
> We will also need some more parts, like a catalogue, a dissemination mechanism, a cheap hosting mechanism and quite a few other bits.
> 
> But who is going to pay for this? Not the readers. So our best bet are organisations interested in OA. The various foundations (Mozilla has strong open science involvement now), publishers who would like their content distributed to more scholars for less money than it'd take them to do it, others I haven't thought of. Maybe even universities (maybe ones that don't have an institutional repository and don't want one right now).
> 
> So there we go, we have a commercial project which builds, maintains and expands clean and well-made mechanisms for distributing Open Access content. It deals with nothing but metadata and openly licensed PDF-s.
> 
> Now, I know you're not arguing for CC-BY-NC specifically. However, anything that is not on CC-BY's level of openness ("freedom given to downstream users") is going to create UNexpected difficulties. NC will make it legally bad, SA may create legal compatibility problems with simple -BY articles. If you imagine yourself as the creator of this service, you've already got a really difficult job ahead of you. You don't want any more difficulties than absolutely necessary! And we as a community don't *want* to place unneeded burden on this hypothetical service builder & maintainer.
> 
> I can't speak for the OA community, but I think this kind of scenario is closer to what Mark was going for than "let's make another RightsLink".
> 
> Business is a way to solve practical problems, how "well" a business behaves will *ultimately* depend on the values of its creators.
> Doing business with OA content is just a way of solving the severe difficulties the OA movement has in expanding its influence and bringing tangible benefits to society, it's not "bad" per se. The question is - is the business bound to the profits of an established publisher, or is it free to prioritise the needs of scholars and the public above all else?
> 
> But maybe those ideas are worthless. Maybe I'm just not imaginative + experienced enough to be able to envisage good solutions. If that is the case, I'd still rather that all scholarly content was licensed in a way which did not prevent somebody better than me from having a go.
> 
> Greetings,
> Emanuil
> 
> 
> On 24 January 2014 14:35, Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca> wrote:
> For the purposes of full understanding of the implications of the CC-BY: I argue that RightsLink is perfectly within its legal rights to sell CC-BY licensed articles whether revenues are shared with the publisher or simply kept by RightsLink. This is a commercial use of the work, hence pre-authorized through the use of the CC-BY license. CC-BY does not impose an obligation on a downstream user to direct customers to free versions, merely a negative obligation to not actively prevent use of free versions. Further I argue that while there are many grey areas where there is no consensus on what constitutes commercial use, the RightsLink example - selling CC-BY articles for a profit - is a clearcut, straightforward, obvious commercial use. That is, if you don't want people to take your work and sell it for a profit, don't use CC-BY.
> 
> Note that this is not an argument for NC. No CC license requires "free of charge". An argument could be made that RightsLink could provide NC licensed articles, charging for their own service but not royalties for the article per se unless by arrangement with a copyright holder. Similarly if you print out an NC article you likely are paying for the paper and printing; this is not a commercial use of the article itself.
> 
> best,
> 
> Heather Morrison