Yes - I agree with Paul. There's very little lost relative to the public domain by going with the CCby license - it's what we chose long ago to use at PLoS.
But it's worth pointing out that the currency of non-commercial intellectual work is citation, which is very different from the attribution protected by the CCby license. Citation is an academic tradition, and the expectation that one cites works they use applies to any published work, no matter the terms under which it was distributed. For example, all works of US government employees have been in the public domain for many decades. But - by tradition if not by law - one still has to cite them when they are used. The CCby license deals with something very different, requiring that, when the work is reproduced, the original citation must be maintained in the copy. Since normal academic referencing does not usually involve replication of the work, this term is moot. Don't get me wrong - I'm not arguing against the use of the CCby license - this is something I strongly advocate. But this is because I see the value in maintaining attribution in a future world where papers are widely replicated, repackaged, etc... - not because it has any real impact on the current academic citation system. On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 4:44 PM, Uhlir, Paul <puh...@nas.edu> wrote: I was referring to the first license below, Les. It has very few restrictions. One could use the CC0 license, which dedicates the work to the public domain, but almost all scientists want attribution, since that is the currency of non-commercial intellectual work. This is why I would reject the pure public domain status of research publications that are the result of government funded research, as suggested by Michael Eisen. There are other reasons to treat the pure public domain option with scepticism, but that is the main one in my view. Paul -----Original Message----- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Leslie Carr Sent: Sun 2/21/2010 4:52 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject:     Re: Captured product vs. service On 21 Feb 2010, at 20:56, Uhlir, Paul wrote: > In response to your last question, yes, if the article is made available under an "Attribution Only" (ATT 3.0) Creative Commons license. This is the recommended license for open access journals and is already broadly in use. The advantage of this license is that it also allows various types of automated knowledge discovery. > CC licenses are not without restrictions! By "Attribution Only" do you mean http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ ? --- Les Carr -- Michael Eisen, Ph.D. Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Associate Professor, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology University of California, Berkeley