This message is a response to a cross-posting from scholcomm from yesterday (link below).
It is a common mistake to think that CC-BY is the legal expression of the BOAI definition of open access. There are important differences. For example, there is nothing in any of the CC licenses that limits the use of licenses (original or downstream) to works that are free of charge. Permitting blanket downstream commercial uses of works includes sale of such works. There are many grey areas in the definition of commercial use, however the primary definition of commercial with respect to copyrighted works is selling the work. Currently the CC licenses list is having a discussion about working towards one-way compatibility of CC-BY-SA to one of the GNU public licenses, something desired by the gaming community. For the open source community, it is code that needs to be open; you can sell your games! My analysis suggests that CC-BY is actually a danger to open access. Downstream users have no obligation to ensure that the original works continue to be made available at all, never mind as open access. Scholarly journals start and stop all the time. The only way to ensure ongoing open access to scholarly works is services dedicated to preservation and ongoing access. That's the work of repositories and libraries, one of the reasons open access policies of funders and institutions should be focused on green OA. My creative commons and open access critique series can be found here: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/10/critique-of-cc-by-series.html My perspective is that to some extent the BOAI definition per se is flawed. For this reason, I only refer to the BOAI vision of OA as unprecedented good, and no longer use the BOAI definition. With respect to the OSI group below: the primary stakeholder group with respect to scholarly communication should be scholars. This is particularly true with respect to an issue like licensing. Whether derivatives are more harmful or helpful to the public or to advance scholarship is a question that requires serious thought and expert answers. Research is needed, to consider for example the different types of potential derivatives and compare benefits and possible harms. To take the example of translations, facilitating user-generated automated translation services (like Google translate or Reverso) for personal use is a very different question from allowing anyone to do a translation and publish a work. The latter would appear to carry a much greater risk of the original author being mis-quoted due to poor translation. Permitting people to use automated tools to enlarge print or enable automated print-to-voice is a very different matter from taking the lightly funded play written by an arts scholar and creating a money-making movie without compensating the author. I would think it obvious that the question of whether granting blanket permission to create derivatives of works describing surgical procedures is safe for downstream users (presumably surgeons working in other languages?) would be a great question for an interdisciplinary team consisting of medical, linguistic / translation studies and creative copyright researchers. This is not a question that is appropriately answered through a survey question of the "what CC license do you like?" variety. Someone with in-depth knowledge needs to give serious thought to the potential harms that could arise from inaccurate derivatives, not just a quick off-the-cuff gut reaction. To think through the implications of different types of derivatives, first people need to think about what different types of derivatives are possible. I'm not sure that anyone actually has a full answer to this question at this point in time. Trial-and-error is necessary, but we may want to think about what kinds of works to experiment with. If people want to play with a few of my charts showing the growth of open access, go for it, but I'm hoping any health service providers working for people I care about are sticking with the most authoritative sources possible. Cross-posted message that this is a reply to: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2015-February/003086.html My reply is posted to GOAL only as I'm not on the scholcomm list. best, Dr. Heather Morrison Assistant Professor École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies University of Ottawa Desmarais 111-02 613-562-5800 ext. 7634 Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: Open Access Scholarship http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/ http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>
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