[open-science] [Open-access] CC-BY

Wed Sep 4 13:36:54 UTC 2013

Peter Murray-Rust wrote :

>
> a CC-NC for an Elsevier article does not forbid commercial re-use- it 
> simply means that re-users have to pay Elsevier an additional and 
> lucrative tax.
>

Normally, it's the copyright owner who controls the conditions of a CC license. And Elsevier doesn't require the transfer of copyright for OA articles. Thus, someone who sees an Elsevier article with a CC-NC license and wishes to reuse it commercially would normally ask the authorization to the author.

But Peter is right, because as part of the publication contract, authors grant Elsevier an exclusive license covering all publishing and distribution rights, which is quite the same in practice as transferring copyright. So, the author should refer any commercial reuse request to Elsevier.

The problem is that, as far as I can tell, these tricky conditions are not displayed in the articles nor clearly stated in Elsevier website, and I'm not sure if authors understand them well when they sign the publication agreement..

By the way, this also illustrates the danger of giving too much emphasis to the fact that the authors keep the copyright (for instance, it's a criterion in PLoS/SPARC openness scale). The relevant question is really the extent of the rights retained (or the permissions obtained) by the author.

Marc Couture