I agree with Graham. The likelihood of CC-BY being used against the
community is effectively zero.

The reverse is NOT true. CC-BY-NC actually grants the publisher an
effective monopoly to charge for re-use rights. This is not hypothetical.
Publishers are making millions out of papers which are licenced NC. You can
verify this by looking at any CC-NC paper (e.g. from Elsevier), following
"Rights and Permissions" (to RightsLink) and then asking (say) for
permission to re-use the paper in a book, or for coursebooks, or for
promotional material or whatever. Reasonable requests will vary between
10USD and 10000 USD. The record amounts of rights paid to a publisher for a
single paper is over a million USD (a pharmaceutical one). [My blog has
many examples over the years].

My guess is that the publishers probably receive 10-100 million USD per
year through re-use payments (and that's probably an underestimate). Note,
of course, that none of this goes to author, or funder.

So if an author choose to use NC they effectively donate many dollars worth
to the publisher. Since I regard Heather's scenario as zero likelihood we
are simply increasing publisher profits, disadvantaging teachers, authors
of books, small businesses, large businesses, etc. I hope that everyone
urging CC-NC realises this damage (which happens every day) and can justify
the additional millions paid to the publishing industry which provide no
benefit to anyone else.



On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 5:26 PM, Graham Triggs <grahamtri...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 29/04/2015 14:09:40, David Prosser <david.pros...@rluk.ac.uk> wrote:
> >It is unlikely that many authors have contracts with publishers requiring
> a particular license even at the time of publication.
>
> When an author submits a paper to a journal they often get a selection of
> licenses to choose from. Surely that’s part of the contract to publish?
>
> Agreed - if you are given the choice of a thing, and pay for a thing, then
> your contract is for that thing.
> Even for fully OA journals, where there is no selection of a licence, then
> the OA licence that is presented is part of the "offering" for which you
> are (likely) paying for.
> If a specific licence is cited as part of the offering, and there are no
> terms and conditions that allow for it to be varied without the author's
> permission, then there are no legal grounds for changing the licence
> (without explicit permission from the author).
>
> On 29 Apr 2015, at 12:52, Heather Morrison <>> wrote:
>
> The potential for downstream enclosure posed by CC-BY is not a problem of
> licenses of individual works, but rather the attraction of large masses of
> works for profit-taking if CC-BY succeeds as default.
>
> *But who is going to pay for it? Certainly not academic libraries, who
> would know that the CC-BY version exists, and make it available to users.*
> *And the downstream enclosure couldn't legally obscure the existence of
> the CC-BY version - they have to acknowledge it in accordance with the
> licence terms.*
>
> A downstream commercial user could compete with Elsevier. Since they don't
> need to bother paying a cent to contribute to the original production
> costs, downstream commercial users are at a relatively advantage compared
> to the original publisher when it comes to added value services.
>
> *The downstream commercial user also won't be paid a cent for providing
> those production costs - that will have gone to Elsevier in the form of
> APCs.*
> *They will largely be competing against Elsevier over something that is
> "free" - the distribution to end users.*
> *Elsevier wouldn't be making much money - if any - from the distribution.
> There might be some advertising attached, and so consideration of that
> revenue. But in the main, a downstream commercial user trying to sell a
> distribution wouldn't be taking significant revenue from Elsevier - they
> would just be reducing their costs.*
>
> If this threatens Elsevier revenue streams (eg competition for Science
> Direct search services as opposed to content, Scopus), it would make
> business sense for Elsevier to change the license for CC-BY works to more
> limited terms, or to revert to toll access and use differential pricing to
> discourage commercial use.
>
> *These are all straw man arguments. We aren't in a hypothetical world of
> not having used CC-BY licences. They have existed and been used in
> publishing for over 10 years.*
> *Look at the growth in publications of BioMed Central (and Springer). And
> the profits they have attracted.*
> *Look at the growth of PLoS, and their avoidance of losing money.*
> *10 years of evidence that publishing CC-BY is not incompatible with
> commercial publishing.*
> *That doesn't mean certain revenue streams may be threatened, and some
> publishers are certainly not actively encouraging a fully CC-BY world. But
> the practical and legal realities of Elsevier doing what you suggest is
> inconceivable.*
> *Regards,*
> *Graham*
>
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>


-- 
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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