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

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 12:44 PM, Nick Barnes <nb at climatecode.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 17:26, Heather Morrison <heatherm at eln.bc.ca> wrote:
>> On 2011-12-12, at 9:04 AM, Nick Barnes wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> For instance, effectively CC-NC prevents the Climate Code Foundation
>>> from using a document to promote the public understanding of climate
>>> science.
>>
>> How is this commercial use? If this is commercial use under CC-NC, then CC-NC needs work.
>
> The Climate Code Foundation is a non-profit company, intending to (for
> instance) train scientists, or develop science outreach materials, or
> organise networks, workshops, and conferences.  All these activities
> need to be funded.  For instance the CCF might be paid for its
> services by an institution, a funding agency, or an NGO.  That's
> "commercial", or could certainly be viewed as such by either an author
> or a court.  Similarly, if we were to have adverts, or a "Donate"
> button, on our blog, we could not quote from a CC-NC work in a blog
> article.

I work at Kitware, a for profit company producing open source
software. Most of this is BSD licensed, and given freely. The CC-NC
license would block my usage as far as I understand it, despite
spending most of my professional time working on open source software
for use by scientists. I hope we can come to an agreement on a less
restrictive license, or at least very clear labeling so that it is
easy for me to tell gratis from libre.

The open source world has a lot of experience to offer here, and I
don't know of any OSI approved licenses with non-commercial clauses. I
hope that the open access community is able to take a similar path, so
that we can concentrate on the science.
>
>> If CC licensing is this complicated, would we be better off not using CC licenses at all?
>
> License choice is of course a matter for the author, as is the
> decision of whether to publish at all.

Well said, but this needs work from all of us to make it clear why
such restrictions are unworkable. I had no idea the situation was as
bad as it appears to be.

Marcus