[Open-access] Crowdsourcing request + BMJ OA Policy

Fri Mar 21 14:42:41 UTC 2014

Hi Mike,

I will ask my colleagues, but my belief is that CC does not want to be seen as an enforcer. For one, CC has no legal standing to be the enforcer; it is the licensor who applied the license in the first place who has licensed her rights, so she is the enforcer. In this case, perhaps the entire research community as a whole is a very good proxy for each individual author. As a last resort, of course, the courts are the enforcer.

Finally, speaking as completely not-a-lawyer, there really is nothing to enforce here. What WB is doing is misrepresenting the license (I am not sure what kind of law it breaks) but they are not violating the license by stating some incorrect nonsense. I can imagine me, as a user, downloading stuff from WB and commercially exploiting it. It would fall on WB to stop me, and they would fail because the license explicitly permits me to do so.

That all said, nothing like a good public-relations storm to set these corps right.

--
Puneet Kishor

On Mar 21, 2014, at 7:33 AM, Mike Taylor <mike at indexdata.com> wrote:

> I think it would be best coming from CC.
> 
> -- Mike.
> 
> 
> On 21 March 2014 14:11, Puneet Kishor <punk.kish at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 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 (c) 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
>> 
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