[open-linguistics] Draft codex for academic publishing

Fri Sep 28 09:24:00 UTC 2018

Hello everyone,

I am forwarding this message on behalf of Sebastian Hellmann to you.

Regards,

Bettina

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Hi all,

http://ceur-ws.org/ was recently reaching out to strengthen their legal 
position, asking for feedback.

We live in an area of web-publishing. In fact, the role of publishers is 
definitely in question. However. there is no clear idea how to do it.  
 From my perspective, the publisher function of persisting papers can be 
achieved by libraries/universities. The function of distribution and 
visibility of papers by better and free/open metadata.

If these two functions are substituted - to the best of my knowledge -  
it seems that a simple codex can be derived with four rules:

1. papers MUST be published royalty-free without compensation (open 
access for everyone)

2. Copyright stays with the authors. Authors MAY choose to give up some 
of their rights and license under CC-BY, as the sole option.

3. SA, NC, ND are strongly discouraged as they stir false expectations 
and are conflicting with unwritten academic rules

4.  metadata, i.e. bibliographic data like bibtex SHOULD be CC-0

Some explanations:

1. is a no-brainer, papers are published to be read. Payment is a 
serious barrier of knowledge transfer

2.  this works with transparent web publishing platforms like 
http://ceur-ws.org/ . So it is an idealisation and might not always work 
*yet*.

3. in detail:

- BY, the only viable option matching expectation on reality, however an 
unnecessary one. In science, you are obliged to cite otherwise it is 
plagiarism, which is serious. So the good scientific practice implies BY 
without explicit license. On the other hand, science is liberal, so you 
can copy and modify basically anything and use it as long as you cite 
it. This is often anchored in national academic law.

- ND propagates false expectation, since you can still derive. In fact, 
science is meant to derive and build upon previous work. What good is a 
license if you can't enforce it.

- NC most of the times the valuable part are the ideas described in the 
paper. They are described (hopefully ;) in a way so that they are 
reproducible. A license is not a patent, so basically anybody can still 
exploit your ideas. https://xkcd.com/ NC makes sense for XKCD, meaning 
you can't print T-Shirts with it and sell it. With papers you can read 
it and use the information to commercialise, just the exact text is licensed

- SA In my opinion SA has the purpose that you can track the 
modifcations by others and if something good comes up you can 
reintegrate it as is. I am not sure, if this has a place in academic 
publishing. I can't imagine a scenario, where scientist X publishes 
under SA and then enforces that scientist Y using and citing his work 
properly is obligated to also publish under SA.

4. might be changed from SHOULD to MUST clearly we would all benefit 
from this.

This is the current state in my head as it makes sense to me and I see 
great potential in it. However, we need to discuss, refine and 
consolidate it as a community.

-- 
All the best,
Sebastian Hellmann

Director of Knowledge Integration and Linked Data Technologies (KILT) 
Competence Center
at the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) at Leipzig University
Executive Director of the DBpedia Association
Projects: http://dbpedia.org, http://nlp2rdf.org, 
http://linguistics.okfn.org, https://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt 
<http://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt>
Homepage: http://aksw.org/SebastianHellmann
Research Group: http://aksw.org
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