[open-science] Should scientific text be put in the public domain rather than licensed with CC-BY?

Wed Jan 12 15:08:55 UTC 2011

I'm having trouble seeing the advantage of CC0 over CC-BY for writing. For
data, a few dozen lines of code can pull in data from a large number of
sources, potentially making it tricky to keep track of all the attributions.
Writing is generally done by humans, so it's hardly onerous to point to
sources.

The scientific search engine example you give (on Quora) would most likely
be exempt under 'fair use' or equivalent provisions, and in any case, I
would consider the links it provides to be attribution. After all, Google
provides 'snippets' of all-rights-reserved works without much trouble. Even
if we can produce software intelligent enough to read free text, and
synthesise interesting summaries from it, we'll undoubtedly want links to
the originals (would automatic summaries actually infringe copyright?).

What could we do if all scientific writing was CC0, that couldn't be done if
it was all CC-BY?

Thomas

On 12 January 2011 13:51, Marius Kempe <m.kempe at qmul.ac.uk> wrote:

> The other point that I feel is worth making is that many of the reasons
> that the Panton Principles and Open Biblio give for using the public domain
> apply equally to scientific texts - why should open scientists advocate a
> confusing two-tiered system of public domain for data and bibliographic
> records but copyright licensing for papers and books?
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