[Open-access] Crowdsourcing request + BMJ OA Policy

Fri Mar 21 14:11:12 UTC 2014

On Mar 21, 2014, at 2:22 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> No.
> See http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_Attribution_2.5
> 
> This garble makes it unclear which licence is actually used (for example words may have been omitted). Maybe it can be gleaned from author-facing rubric. I have copied Puneet from CC to alert him to this gross misuse of CC licences.
> 
> 
> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 9:09 AM, Michelle Brook <michelle.brook at okfn.org> wrote:
>> Thanks Stuart :-D
>> 
>> I wanted to get the WIley-Blackwell ones done, but got annoyed with the repeated statement:
>> 
>> 'Copyright © 2013 International Society for Neurochemistry' (this obviously varies across journals), 'Re-use of this article is permitted in accordance with the Creative Commons Deed, Attribution 2.5, which does not permit commercial exploitation.'
>> 
>> Is there something I'm misunderstanding about cc-by version 2.5? 
> 

As PMR says, you are not misunderstanding—that statement by Wiley-Blackwell is nonsense. All CC BY licenses allow as much commercial exploitation as your heart may desire.

Of course, we could just use the works and commercially exploit it as per CC BY. However, perhaps the better approach is that as members of the global scientific community, we all submit a joint statement to WB (it doesn’t need to come from CC; we, the public-at-large can and should speak out). Perhaps we should draft a few boilerplate statements indicating specific errors such as the above, and mail them out to the offenders. What would be the most effective signature (from:) on such an email?

--
Puneet Kishor
Manager, Science and Data Policy
Creative Commons