[open-science] SPARC author addendum uses CC-NC licence and now all hybrid publishers have followed

Mon Dec 12 09:18:21 UTC 2011

Dear All

I've been following this from a distance as, co-incidentally, I have been in South Africa working with people there interested in Scholarly Communications and development for Africa. I've written a post which you can find here:

http://cameronneylon.net/blog/open-access-for-the-other-85/

It only really deals with part of the argument but I hope it makes that case - I also hope it will bring in more of the voices that Heather has been asking for, those from the developing world who can give their own view and expertise.

Briefly on some other issues:

I love it when people copy my content and link back to me. It increases my Page Rank, it brings more eyeballs to my opinions, and it increases my "impact". My view is that these people are doing free advertising for me. Now I don't feed myself with this writing so I am speaking from a position of privilege but I would also argue that I could feed myself by using the profile that those words have got me. Again - these people are doing my advertising for me.

The NC view, which I can understand, is one of "if I can't make money of this then no-one else will". But we're in the process of creating entirely new markets and expanding existing ones. When someone else makes money of your work they potentially bring money and attention back into the commons, growing the opportunities for others to make more money. The economics of networks can be entirely different, and an open network can scale more effectively than a closed one.

Now there are, as Heather - and I think it was - Dario say, risks of enclosure and monopolisation. But these to my view are social and economic risks, not legal ones. And they are better handled using instruments other than legal ones. At the end of the day an NC licence is of no value unless you're prepared to go to the wall to defend it. The people who are going to cheat will still cheat - the ones you'd like to use your content will be scared away. I think we do need much more evidence on the realities of what happens and how the complex mixture of licence and legal instrument and licence and social signal that we seem to have really works in practice. But in the meantime I will stick with the view that we need social and economic instruments to mitigate the risks of monopolisation and enclosure, and not legal ones.

I'm afraid I'm back offline for a couple of days but will try to follow the ongoing (and very valuable!) discussion.

Cheers

Cameron

On 12 Dec 2011, at 04:43, Heather Morrison wrote:

> Comment and question for Michael below - best, heater
> 
> 
> On 11-Dec-11, at 7:36 PM, Michael Nielsen wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Sun, 11 Dec 2011, Heather Morrison wrote:
>> 
>>> Two comments (capitals are just a formatting thing, I'm not angry!)
>>> 
>>> COPYRIGHT DOES NOT COVER IDEAS
>>> 
>>> It sounds to me like you are making a common mistake, assuming that copyright applies to ideas. Please correct me if I am wrong about this.
>> 
>> I'm well aware copyright law isn't intended to apply to ideas.  The intent of my remark was to summarize part of the reason I am broadly in favour of the general principle that publicly funded science should be open science. The use of non-NC licenses seems to me to follow as a very specific instance of this broad general principle.  I hope that clarifies the intent of my remarks.
> 
> Comment: this does clarify your intent - and it is a noble intent - with respect to this one issue. I don't agree that the one follows from the other, except in a simplistic sense.
> 
> Question for you: your comments here are on publicly funded science. The discussion on the list has been about scholarly publishing CC licensing in general - what I understand as a plan to pressure all OA publishers to adopt CC-BY licenses, as well as about eliminating the NC option from CC licensing. Can you comment on these two broader issues? Do you have an intent here, and if so, what is it?
> 
> 
>> 
>>> PRIVATE GAIN AS BROADER COMMONS
>>> 
>>> It sounds to me like you are saying that  commercial products "benefits the broader public" and is a "broader commons". Is this what you meant to say? If so, I have some further questions for you...
>> 
>> I certainly believe that many commercial products benefit the broader public.  On the other hand, I don't believe that most (there are some exceptions) commercial products are part of a broader commons, although of course they do build on a broad background commons of basic scientific research.
>> 
>> Michael
> 
> 
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