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

Wed Sep 4 17:47:56 UTC 2013

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 4:43 PM, Luke Winslow <lawinslow at wisc.edu> wrote:

> Wait.
>
>  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.
>>
>
It is possible that the contract signed by the author is not consistent
with CC-NC.The wording might "give" the publisher exclusive rights to some
things (although it may not). You would have to read the contract

 Call me a noob, but how does this happen? Can you really grant "exclusive
> license covering all publishing and distribution rights" to a third party
> on something released under creative commons? It seems to me that there
> should be nothing prohibiting me from downloading all creative commons
> articles (from any journal) and re-distributing them on my own website (in
> a non-commercial way), right?
>

You may. The problem is that the primary place that
re-use rights are offered is on the publisher's website through RightsLink.
This gives a wide range of options for re-use and the answer can be:
* yes, you can re-use
* please contact the publisher
*yes, but pay the publisher for the privilege

I have never had a message that routes me to the author.

I think Rightslink is a poor way of tackling the problem as it has
automatic algorithms and the primary purpose is to generate revenue for the
publisher, not the author.

Also I see no reason why the *author* could not offer anyone CC-BY rights
as long as they retained copyright and did not transfer rights to the
publisher.

>
> I guess I was interpreting this all similar to the open source world. I
> can download all the open source code in the world and host it on my own
> website as long as I adhere to the terms of the license. It seems like

putting additional restrictions on top of a CC license violates the CC
> license itself.
>
>
Almost all OSI-compliant F/OSS licences are essentially equivalent to CC-BY
or CC-BY-SA (or possibly public domain) . The NC clause was abandoned many
years ago and (IMO) this was a great step forward.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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