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

Wed Sep 4 17:58:57 UTC 2013

Luke Winslow wrote:

>
> Can you really grant "exclusive license covering all publishing and
> distribution rights" to a third party on something released under creative 
> commons?
>

Good question. I'd say that this license (between the author and the publisher) applies in practice only to the rights the author doesn't grant the users according to the CC-license chosen. So, the right to authorize commercial uses, if the -NC condition is used, and the right to make adaptations (derivative works), is the -ND condition is used.

But I agree that there could be a contradiction here, because the normal definition of an exclusive license is that no other license covering the same rights can be granted to another party. But I'm not able to go farther into the legal intricacies of such a case.

For a CC-BY license, however, all use rights are granted to all. There is thus no need for a license between the author and the publisher, as no permission need be asked to the right holder (or the licensee) for any use. As far as I can tell (I checked just a few) OA journals using CC-BY don't use author-publisher licenses.

Marc Couture