There are arguments against CC-BY as a default that apply across all disciplines. The most important is the potential for downstream enclosure. The sale of the business you've been involved with, William (Mendeley) to Elsevier may be illustrative here. Scholars who upload works to services like Mendeley are not necessarily aware of the business environment. BioMedCentral was bought by Springer a few years ago. Springer continues to run BMC on an open access basis, but they have no obligation to continue in this direction (unless there is a contractual obligation behind the scenes that requires this). A broad-based CC-BY success of the open access movement could easily and quickly revert to toll access on a massive scale in the future (short, medium or long term).
A system of institutional and disciplinary repositories full of content available under generally more restrictive terms (eg fair use / fair dealing base), with some redundancy through multiple copies, would be a more sustainable system for open access. To return to the topic of whether strong fair use / fair dealing with more restrictive licenses might be better for open access and scholarship, there will be examples from areas of science similar to the ones that I have made for communication. For example in all applied sciences (eg engineering, some areas of chemistry, medicine), some researchers will be working with (or critiquing) organizations of various types (commercial, government, not-for-profit). These organizations will sometimes have materials of use in academic works (photos, videos, figures, charts). In the case of cooperating organizations, scholars may have more success obtaining permission to use third party works if they will be included in works with more restrictive terms (eg all rights reserved or CC-BY-NC-ND). In the case of critique, arguments for rights to use portions of works to critique them (fair use / fair dealing) cannot be extended to rights to grant blanket downstream commercial and derivative rights, or to create a situation where others could assume such rights in error by indicating that the whole work (article, book, journal) is CC-BY. Issues with third party works with CC-BY defaults are inability to include third party works, academic freedom issues if scholars cannot include works because of a CC-BY policy, legal risks for decision-makers who demand or strongly encourage others to use CC-BY, and I argue ultimately limitations on the kinds of research that academics can do if we must work under expectations of releasing all our works as CC-BY. Issues with third party works were mentioned in the responses to the recent review of the RCUK policy with respect to the CC-BY requirement: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/2014review/ best, Heather Morrison On Apr 26, 2015, at 3:11 AM, "William Gunn" <william.g...@gmail.com<mailto:william.g...@gmail.com>> wrote: Thanks for sharing your well - thought position, Heather. My background is science, where the arguments for CC-BY are clear (legal uncertainty inhibits reuse), but I don't profess to know the dynamics of communication studies. In your example of a film still, why would it be ok to use in the first paper, but not downstream? Is the argument that TV & film producers will seek to prevent even scholarly use of their works if authors retain copyright vs. publishers? On Apr 25, 2015 3:11 PM, "Heather Morrison" <heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote: The types of works that many students and faculty would like to be able to include in scholarly works are not necessarily from other scholarly works. For example, scholars in my doctoral discipline of communication study a wide range of types of works including newspapers, television, films, cartoons, advertising, blogs and social media, and public relations materials. It is very useful for scholars to be able to include images and text from the primary source materials, either as illustration or for purposes of critique. Obtaining permission to use even small excerpts of such works is time-consuming at best. I argue that it would be in the best interests of scholarship to advocate for strong fair use / fair dealing exceptions for research and academic critique globally and accept that more restrictive licenses may be necessary to avoid the potential for re-use errors that could easily occur with blanket licenses allowing broad re-use. For example, while it makes sense to allow scholars to include small movie stills in an academic piece, it could be quite problematic for scholars to include such items in works that grant blanket commercial and re-use rights downstream. This illustrates what I see as one of the problems with the one size fits all CC-BY license preferred by some open access advocates (which I consider to be a serious error): what I interpret as an implicit assumption that all of the works scholars are likely to want to re-use are other scholarly works. Rather than making assumptions, let's do some research to find out what scholars and students would like to be able to re-use. Anecdotally, in my experience the most popular items for re-use are images from popular culture (especially characters from the Simpsons TV series), not scholarly works. Scholarly journals like to use photos to add interest and aesthetic value. If it is the case that the greatest interest in re-use for scholars involves works from popular culture / outside the academy, then ubiquitous CC-BY licenses for absolutely every scholarly article, book, and dataset in the whole world would not solve the primary re-use question for a majority of scholars. This is not meant to suggest that advocacy for global fair use / fair dealing rights for academic research and critique is an easy task, rather to raise the question of whether this is an appropriate and useful goal for scholarly works. This post is part of the Creative Commons and Open Access Critique series on my scholarly blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics. To comment on the blogpost: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2015/04/a-case-for-strong-fair-use-fair-dealing.html Creative Commons and Open Access Critique series: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/10/critique-of-cc-by-series.html best, -- Dr. Heather Morrison Assistant Professor École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies University of Ottawa http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/ heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca> _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
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