[open-science] Lack of explicit licences

Peter Murray-Rust pm286 at cam.ac.uk
Wed Jul 7 12:40:19 UTC 2010


On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 10:39 AM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:

> [...]
>


>
> *
> *That strikes me as being self contradictory: the creative commons license
> exists precisely to permit reproduction without the consent of the author.
> Am I right in thinking that the Noderivs license also means that the thesis
> can only be reused in its entirety?
>
> Maybe we should think about how to get the universities up to speed with
> this, before etheses are old enough that they think "this is how we've
> always done it".
>
> Yes!

I am now firmly convinced that the OKF should have an Open Thesis project.
We can, must, and will liberate theses from this. NC-ND is totally
inappropraite IMO for an academic work.

I note that theses are comprehensively downloaded by Google. I have done a
snap test in retrieveing sentences from a thesis and have observed that
every single sentence is indexed by Google and redisplayed in context (i.e.
Google have all the paragraphs, etc.)

So my simple question is what gives Google the right to do this and why are
we not allowed to do it? Or do Google simply ignore copyright on any
documents found openly exposed on the Internet?

If Google does this with impunity and ig no authors or repositories complain
then I would think we have a very strong moral right (if not precise legal
right) to do the same. Trademarks can lapse if they are not defended.
Although I assume this is not true for copyright  (i.e. repeated multiple
violations without action do not constitute a formal defence) I would see
that in academia it is effectively defensible.

So Open Thesis - should I propose it on okfn-discuss?

P.


-- 
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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