[Open-access] MIT Press Journals

Thu Jun 4 10:12:10 UTC 2015

Can I highlight the importance of the exclusive/non-exclusive publishing
agreement authors sign with CC licences - as so well described in Tom's
blog post mentioned above
https://doajournals.wordpress.com/2015/06/02/copyright-and-licensing-part-2/

I recently came across a case where an author wished to republish one of
his own articles in an anthology. The author had paid the orginal publisher
a "Open Access apc" to licence the original article CC BY-NC-ND, but signed
a contract with the 'exclusive' publishing clause. Thus the original
publisher is legally able to prevent the author republishing his own
article in a different format (and, in fact, appeared to be doing just
that). It also means that the original publisher has complete control over
granting permissions for any re-use of the article (that is, reuse not
automatically granted by the CC licence) for the full lifetime of the
copyright, unless there is an explicit time limit on the 'exclusive'
publishing agreement - which is not common presently.

Of course, many publishers will respond that unless they have a exclusivity
clause or similar restriction the author could immediately re-publish the
work under any other licence (at an extreme CC 0 or public domain) s/he
wishes - which, for those publishers, defeats the purpose of applying the
initial licence. But for an OA work it seems to me ensuring that the
unrestricted copyright remains with the author is really important, and not
well articulated to date. So it is a great thing that DOAJ has identified
the importance of this and included an unrestricted copyright condition for
their SEAL.

Rupert

On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 11:36 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <
peter.murray.rust at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Cameron, you're right.
>
> I will reserve judgment till we know more.
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Cameron Neylon <cn at cameronneylon.net>
> wrote:
>
>> 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 Neylon
>> cn 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
>>> Twitter   @ccess
>>> LinkedIn  http://nl.linkedin.com/in/tomolijhoek/
>>>
>>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
>
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-- 
Dr Rupert Gatti
Director
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