[open-science] Elsevier caught selling articles that should have been open access

Tue Mar 10 21:31:34 UTC 2015

    > I'd be careful with copyleft science. It did propel open-source
    > in computing to international importance, but a lot, lot, lot of
    > people nowadays just use permissive licensing, because copyleft
    > has problems.

That's a long tangential discussion, but I think that the only
"problem" with copyleft is that it seeks to prevent people making
proprietary things, by design. There are people who do not want
this design particularly as it is unappealing to many financiers and
perhaps they have some hope of venture funding or acquisition.

    > But you don't generally reuse articles inside other articles,
    > how would copyleft work on scientific text?

I imagine it would be more relevant for compilations. Well edited
collections of good articles -- particularly in fields with prodigious
publishing volume of mostly unreadable stuff -- would be quite
valuable. And I'm sure that many people would like these collections
of the most significant papers in various fields in dead tree form on
their bookshelves. This is one example of something useful that
publishers could do that is enabled by removing NC, but needs SA to
prevent it from turning exploitative.

    > E.g. what would say CC-SA achieve?  Doesn't prevent anybody from
    > picking up the artifact and selling it if they want to.

Personally my choice would be something like the GFDL with an
invariant section making the distribution terms -- and possibly a link
where to get the original -- quite clear. Trying to sell copies
without doing anything useful would be immediately obvious as a scam.

    > The issue here is that the funder (e.g. RCUK, Wellcome) doesn't
    > want companies to do that to OA articles.

The web page for the article in question no longer tries to sell
anything so we might charitably assume that this was an error, someone
at Elsevier ticked the wrong box on the CMS.

Supposing the article didn't have a NC clause. In that case I don't
actually think someone selling access to the article would be doing
anything wrong (morally as well as legally). They would be selling
something that can be got for free elsewhere which would be
embarrassingly scammy, probably a foolish business model, but not
wrong.

Using copyleft here, with an appropriate invariant section, makes
sense because it makes things clear. The problem is not commercial
use. Commercial use is fine as long as it does not restrict
access. The important thing is having the freedom to read and learn
and not to do anything to prevent others from having the same freedom
and this is what copyleft privileges.

-w
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