[Open-access] MIT Press Journals

Wed Jun 3 09:53:24 UTC 2015

Hi Folks

I think there are two different things being conflated here. The use of CC licenses and whether content is Open Access. Let me try and illustrate with an example.

If you go to an Elsevier subscription journal and purchase an article (or you have a subscription) you can get an article under some form of legal agreement or license. That license could have many forms, it could even be a CC license of some form (although that would be unusual). But the type of license tells you nothing about whether that article is Open Access or not. 

Equally consider another option. Making something available under a CC BY license means that someone downstream can use an article, perhaps put it in a book, and sell it. Allowing this kind of activity is part of why some of us advocate for CC BY (and also why some people advocate against it!). But whichever side of that fence you sit you can see that there is a symmetry. If someone downstream can sell access then someone upstream can as well.

The CC licenses are explicitly designed to allow this kind of thing. It is a feature not a bug. See for instance Open Book Publishers offering CC BY books in print or epub for a price but the online version free to read. 

As long as MIT press is not claiming the articles are OA I think this is positive. It’s helpful that they are using a standard user license rather than a bespoke one for their subscription content. I’d prefer they use a more liberal one, but baby steps. It is clear that someone with a legitimate copy could place one in a repository, provided that repository is not “commercial” in any sense, which as usual is difficult to define.

Cheers

Cameron

Cameron Neyloncn at cameronneylon.net - http://cameronneylon.net

@cameronneylon - http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0068-716X

On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 10:34 AM, Tom Olijhoek <tom.olijhoek at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
> I agree with PMR that this is appalling.
> I  think that the CC licenses should be used in cases where the author
> retains the unrestricted copyright.
> That is the kind of open access we need, other constructions with transfer
> of copyright or exclusive publishing rights or transfer of commercial
> rights to the publisher all lead to situations where sharing is compromised.
> I have just published a blogpost at the DOAJ blogsite on the issue of
> copyright in the open access setting:
>  please share if you wish:
> https://doajournals.wordpress.com/2015/06/02/copyright-and-licensing-part-2/
> BTW  DOAJ recently decided that unrestricted copyright for the author is
> one of the criteria for it's SEAL.
> On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 10:09 AM, Flanagan,D <D.Flanagan at lse.ac.uk> wrote:
>>  Hi all,
>>
>>
>>
>> I emailed MIT Press about an article that had a CC license but appeared to
>> be behind a paywall.
>>
>>
>>
>> The response I received from MIT Press Journals was as follows:
>>
>>
>>
>> Creative Commons licenses work in tandem with copyright rather than as a
>> substitute for it. On behalf of MIT, the MIT Press is the copyright holder
>> of the articles found in IJLM and because of this we reserve the right to
>> sell the articles.  However, the articles are sold with a CC BY-NC-ND
>> license attached, which allows the user to share the work with others
>> provided that they fully credit the IJLM article.  With this license users
>> cannot change the article in any way or use it commercially.
>>
>>
>>
>> It seems a little against the spirit of the CC license and a rather odd
>> choice for an academic publisher to make.
>>
>>
>>
>> I was trying to get this article to put in our institutional repository on
>> behalf of an academic. It will be interesting to hear what she has to say
>> about this…
>>
>>
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>>
>>
>> Dimity.
>>
>>
>>
>> *Dimity Flanagan*
>>
>> Library Assistant, Research Support Services, LSE Research Online
>> <http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/>
>>
>> London School of Economics and Political Science
>>
>> 10 Portugal Street, London WC2A 2HD
>>
>> tel: 020 7955 6311 | email: D.Flanagan at lse.ac.uk
>>
>>
>>
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>>
> -- 
> Tom Olijhoek PhD
> Codex Consult  '*'Open Science for Development''*
> Editor in Chief, Directory of Open Access Journals DOAJ.ORG
> Consultant for Open Access
> Consultant Soil Microbiology and Soil fertility
> SKYPE tom.olijhoek
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> LinkedIn  http://nl.linkedin.com/in/tomolijhoek/
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