[open-science] Lack of explicit licences [was Re: OKF: What shall I say at the Open Science Summit in Berkeley]

Wed Jul 7 09:39:24 UTC 2010

On 7 July 2010 07:58, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> It is exactly this sort of lack of clarity that we have to address. It's
> quite clear that Universities don't generally know/care and University
> repositories are stuffed full of "burn in hell" copyright clauses. This is a
> tragedy for theses and I am going to propose to OKF that we develop an Open
> Thesis project.
>

For example: my university mentioned creative commons when they were telling
us about the etheses system (see http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/ ), but
described it as a way to give your work "more protection" than copyright.
Looking at a few recent etheses, they seem to use a standard boilerplate:

*This electronic thesis is protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
No reproduction is permitted without consent of the author. It is also
protected by
the Creative Commons Licence allowing Attributions-Non-commercial-No
derivatives.

*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".

Thomas
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