[open-science] Announcing the open source release of scholarly publishing platform, sci.pe

Fri Jul 12 20:48:08 UTC 2019

I do not understand the licence that you use. It does not appear to be
compliant with OSI or the Open Definition.

On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 8:37 PM Tiffany Bogich <tiffany at sci.pe> wrote:

> We are excited to announce the open-source release of our scholarly
> publishing platform sci.pe.
>

You describe this as "open source" presumably compliant with
https://opensource.org/ (OSI).

> To view the full announcement, visit:
> https://research.sci.pe/ballesteros2019b. sci.pe source code can be found
> on Github: https://github.com/science-periodicals and sci.pe vision at
> https://sci.pe/get-started/vision.
>

Your Github repo has no LICENSE.md . You state:
"@scipe/api is dual-licensed under commercial and open source licenses (
AGPLv3 <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html>) based on the
intended use case. Contact us to learn which license applies to your use
case."

This implies that the license is dependent on the user, their motivation
("based on the intended use case") and their business.

> We are trying a dual license approach so that not-for-profit, open access
> journals can benefit from the platform free of charge while still allowing
> sci.pe to continue development with the support of our cloud offering and
> commercial license options.
>

Open Source (https://opensource.org/osd-annotated ) deliberately makes
>>>6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a
specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program
from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

*Rationale:* The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license
traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want
commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.
>>>
Therefore I do not see how, from what you have said, that the program is
"open source"
(technically A/GPL is Free software, not Open, you appear not to be
compliant with either.)

I hope this is of interest and if you would like more information feel free
> to contact us (contact at sci.pe) or follow us on github (science-periodicals
> <https://github.com/science-periodicals>) or twitter (@scipeTweets
> <https://twitter.com/scipeTweets>).
>
> In essence, if you licence your software under any F/OSS licence , the
licensee can be of any type (profit, non-profit) and the software can be
used for any legal purpose whether for profit or not.

> Tiffany Bogich, PhD
> Co-founder, sci.pe (science periodicals)
> 7 World Trade Center, 46th Floor
> New York, New York 10007
>
> mobile: +1 917 882 5422
> email: tiffany at sci.pe
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-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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