Chris Rusbridge – who directs the UK Digital Curation Centre – has made an excellent comment on my post Molecules? Does “Open Access” help or hinder Open Science?
I’m confused! Peter says “BOAI permits commercial re-use; MDPI does not.” But his article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial licence, so it too fails the BOAI test! And I’m required to submit to that licence in adding my comments (I’m happy to, by the way).
- There are a couple of issues here. One is that sites often have stupid licence terms, that say things they do not mean; I suspect that the site might change its terms if it was asked carefully and often enough. As a digression but illustration, I have an email somewhere from many years ago, in which I wrote to Elsevier about the copyright notice on their web site, which then read (my emphasis) “All rights reserved. No part of this service may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.” Asking for written permission before downloading a web page (which you had to download before you could read the notice, was a bit, well, duhhh! I asked for that written notice, which never arrived, and it took several months for the notice to get changed.Another issue is that just because the default licence does not allow commercial re-use, does not mean that commercial re-use is forbidden! It just means that commercial re-use may be subject to a separate licence.Maybe the real bugbear is that they still ask for a copyright transfer. I really object to this, and just don’t do it. It is (I understand) uncommon practice in book publishing anyway.
PMR comments:
- Our site. We discussed the license and thought that a non-commercial license for posters would make it easier to induce them to agree to a common license. It’s a little hard to guess what licenses others would offer. For myself I would offer full BOAI – I just though a differential license would be confusing. But if anyone has a suggestion for a form of words, fine. (If anyone wishes to re-sell my blog I have to be brave enough to think that the fame I would get would suffice).
- Stupid licenses. Yes, I agree that many publishers have put up meaningless and complex licenses that date from the time of parchments. I have written to some of them (mainly about scientific data) asking how the licenses should be interpreted in the age of computers. Some give a null response; others reply that they will get back to me (they don’t). I have other things to do with my (sad) life so I have given up this game. Since I have a kind and generous disposition I assume that the fuzz and muddle of these ancient licenses are due to fuzz and muddle. However there are some publishers who are very clear that these licenses are to prevent the re-use of data in the computer age and the require us to hand over copyright of our scientific facts. So we have to tackle this.
- default licenses. I don’t think Chris meant this, but many publishers have additional licenses which the normal reader never sees. Thus the librarian (increasingly a purchasing officer) signs a complex contract with the publisher about what the readers (I hate the phrase “users” – there are other uses for journals than reading, though I can think of many for e-journals). These contracts are all about what the readers are not allowed to do and if the y do it how the publishers will cut the institution off without warning (Do you read journals, or “use a database”?). While I hope all academics are aware of the importance of copyright, surely no one can be expected to be aware of the contractual arrangements with the myriad publishers. (And I bet they are not only per-publisher, but also per journal).
- I met with Alma Swan this morning – she was collecting data for a survey on libraries. She tells me that science publishers are now starting to embed digital watermarks in their publications. Don’t they trust us?
I often see things like “if you want permission to do this, write to the publisher”. This simply doesn’t work in the eScientific age. Peter Corbett and I and colleagues analyse the biochemical literature. PubMed has millions (sic) of abstracts. We – through our linguistic robots – can read all of these (we’ve only read a few hundred thousand so far).
I have now got some thoughts together for posts on Open Access for Scientists and no longer have early-morning distractions and depressions 🙁 – some of you will understand. So I’ll try to get some of this out – and licenses are a critical part.