[open-humanities] Statement on Open Access from History Journal editors

Tue Dec 11 09:24:45 UTC 2012

Dear list,

The editors of a number of history journals have issued a statement on 
open access:
http://www.history.ac.uk/news/2012-12-10/statement-position-relation-open-access
It's very disappointing, and very odd as well. The kicker is the fourth 
point:

4. The licence that we will offer for publication in EITHER green OR 
gold will be a CCBY NC ND (creative commons non-commercial 
non-derivative) licence only; that is, it will not allow commercial 
reuse, or tweaking or reuse of parts of an article (text mining). The 
government has specified that ‘gold’ access is to be given on a CCBY 
licence, the most permissive form of creative commons licence that there 
is. This however means that commercial re-use, plagiarism, and 
republication of an author’s work will be possible, subject to the 
author being ‘credited’ (but it is not clear in what way they would be 
credited). We believe that this is a serious infringement of 
intellectual property rights and we do not want our authors to have to 
sign away their rights in order to publish with us.

John

-- 
John Levin
http://www.anterotesis.com
http://twitter.com/anterotesis