[Continuing the cross-posting as I think this is very impotrtant.] On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 7:33 PM, Jan Velterop <velte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> There is an inconsistency here, either way. We've always heard, from > Stevan Harnad, that the author was the one who intrinsically had copyright > on the manuscript version, so could deposit it, as an open access article, > in an open repository irrespective of the publisher's views. If that is > correct, then the author could also attach a CC-BY licence to the > manuscript version. If it is incorrect, the author can't deposit the > manuscript with open access without the explicit permission of the > publisher of his final, published version, and the argument advanced for > more than a decade by Stevan Harnad is invalid. Which is it? I think Stevan > was right, and a manuscript can be deposited with open access whether or > not the publisher likes it. Whence his U-turn, I don't know. But if he was > right at first, and I believe that's the case, that also means that it can > be covered by a CC-BY licence. Repositories can't attach the licence, but > 'gold' OA publishers can't either. It's always the author, as copyright > holder by default. All repositories and OA publishers can do is require it > as a condition of acceptance (to be included in the repository or to be > published). What the publisher can do if he doesn't like the author making > available the manuscript with open access, is apply the Ingelfinger rule or > simply refuse to publish the article. > > I think this is really important. The problem has arisen in large part because the need for licenses was not clear and the technology to support them was not available when Open Access started. We now have a clear mechanism for describing the final state of a manuscript using CC-* licences. These are simple and extremely powerful. First a comment on "Green". Green is defined as "self-archiving" - i.e a process. Howeve SH has agreed on this list that "Green" is a state of the final document. We can make statements such as: "this manuscript M is available as a Green OA document in repository M". >From thepoint of view of the accessor (user) of the document it is irrelevant how it got there. It may have been "single-clicked" by a user in Soton or through a much more arduous process in some other repositories. It may have been deposited by Elsevier as part of their agreement with NIH. These are all equivalent to the final user - the document is there. However the document does not, per se indicate that it is Green and without a licence there is no way of knowing definitively. If it is removed from the repo (e.g. downloaded onto a desktop all the metadata in the repo is lost. In conttast documents published with "Gold publishers" such as BMC or PLoS or IUCr or EGU or many others are carefully labelled with copyright and licence (they are formally separate). This means that any relocation of the document preserves the copyright owner and the licence. The problem with Green and I suspect many hybrid Gold (Ross do we have evidence on this?) is that the documents may not carry the copyright and the licence. I think it is critical that all documents - whether Green or Gold - are now labelled with both copyright owner and licence. It is technically simple to add to the productions process and it should be possible to add to the deposition in a repository. The problem with many publishers terms and conditions are that they are badly written and often self-contradictory. It is impossible for a reader to determine what their rights are. In an industry which takes about 15 Billion from the academic sector it is surely possible to create a quality approach to labelling and licensing. I will comment on the idea of authors adding CC-BY licences separately. I think it has great potential. I cannot see why all members of this list should not support it. -- 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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