petermr's blog

I recently described /pmr/2013/08/09/crowdsourcing-at-crowdcrafting-were-doing-antimatter-research-2/ why I was helping (in a very small way) a Crowdcrafting project to help CERN scientists in finding how antimatter behaves in gravity. Here’s an update http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2013/08/08/join-the-dots-to-measure-antimatter/ about why and what the experiment is about (from James Doherty, Open University, UK):

Join the dots to measure antimatter

This article was also published on CERN’s website on 8.8.13.

3D reconstruction of particle tracks.

Does antimatter fall up or down?

The AEgIS experiment at CERN needs your help to analyse experimental results to figure out how antimatter is affected by gravity. Just join the dots to reconstruct particle tracks and your contribution could be included in an upcoming scientific publication.

The aim of AEgIS is to measure the effect of the Earth’s gravitational acceleration on antihydrogen. Seeing a different behavior for antimatter than for matter would be a huge surprise, and would indicate that gravity is much more complicated than our present understanding indicates.

In the AEgIS experiment, antihydrogen atoms are made to fly horizontally, dropping by a tiny amount, before colliding with matter. On collision the antihydrogen and matter annihilate, producing a burst of mostly pions and some other particles. These particles then travel through an emulsion containing silver bromide developed by the University of Bern in Switzerland that makes their tracks visible. Tracing these tracks to their point of origin tells the AEgIS team exactly where each annihilation occurred, which in turn allows them to calculate how far each particle travels, and how far the particle’s path drops. From the distance the particles fly and fall the AEGIS team hope to calculate the effect of gravity on antimatter.

AEgIS needs your help to map the paths that particles take through the emulsion. As part of the CERN Summer Webfest some of this year’s summer students have created a web application to map particle tracks. All you have to do is join the dots!

“In principle, tracking could be digitized, but computers can miss tracks that are related, but far apart,” says AEgIS spokesperson Michael Doser, who, inspired by astronomy websites such as Astrowatch and Galaxy Zoo, decided to crowdsource the analysis. “I’m using human pattern recognition – we’re pretty good at seeing things that belong together.”

First test data from AEgIS have been uploaded to the web application directly and have never been analysed before. So you can make a genuine contribution to CERN’s research. The data you provide will be openly available and help physicists at CERN with their analysis of the experiment. The results will be visualized on this page as a 3D Model.

The experiment requires about 1000 antihydrogen annihilations for a statistically significant observation, says Doser, but he hopes to have anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 particle tracks analysed to check AEgIS’s algorithms for even tiny biases.

“Algorithms are not curious,” says Doser. “If we had something unexpected, a computer may not see it. But humans are open to new ways of looking at things. And besides, it’s fun!”

Epilepsy warning: The particle tracks contain rapidly flashing screens. If you are epileptic, perhaps best to skip this bit.

Analyse AEgIS data now!

If this looks interesting, join them. It looks a great project and if you are interested in science you can make a contribution and help. You don’t need to know any science to start with.

Elsevier has replied (italics) to my blog post /pmr/2013/08/14/elsevier-charges-3000-usd-apc-and-then-retains-all-rights-is-this-openaccess-no-they-then-put-it-behind-paywall-32-usd/ and addressed one of the problems I reported

Dear Peter,

Thank you for pointing out these concerns. It’s a good thing to have someone so focused on pointing issues out for us, though the immediate assumption of the worst is not entirely helpful.

I did not “assume the worst”. I wrote:

Elsevier don’t seem care very much about honouring agreements they make with authors and/or they aren’t very competent at publishing. If you take 3000USD of someone and contract to apply one of three licences then you have a legal requirement to do so.

I contend that any organization which exacts such a high fee from a customer has a duty of care above what you have shown.

As you know the infrastructure underpinning publishing is considerable, and has evolved over a very long period of time with the scholarly communication system itself. We readily acknowledged the large scale of change and investment in this infrastructure that is required to support new open access business models, and we readily acknowledge that systems issues are inevitable.

I do not accept that failures in public offerings such as the ones that I have encountered are “inevitable”. You promoted a list of a relatively few Open Access journals to the world and failed to check that they worked properly. The very fact that I have discovered at least three independent issues in half a day suggests that you did no user testing of the Open Access licensing issue. Saying that’s it’s a big task is no excuse – you have billions in revenue that should be used to get things right.

We have teams in place proactively planning system enhancements, and we work hard to repair errors as they occur. Nevertheless, it is useful to be alerted to problems and concerns so that we are able to address these.

It is far better to test the systems before release.

As I mentioned to you on twitter, we have investigated the various issues you raised and have found different problems behind each. In this first response I can provide you and your readers with an update on the last issue you raised. Using this article as an example – http://www.currenttherapeuticres.com/article/S0011-393X%2813%2900009-X/abstract – you expressed concern that we are systematically charging PPV fees for open access articles. This is not the case. Our investigations show that this article is correctly displaying as an open access article on our ScienceDirect platform, but not on our Health Advance platform. Thank you for alerting us to this – the Health Advance team is currently working to correct this and to understand why the correct settings were not picked up for this article.

I was not the only one to discover the paywall – Twitter had pictures of the paywall at 31.50 USD. Clicking the paywall did not allow me to view the article. I did not assert that this was systematic – I regard even one problem as serious. You appear to have fixed the bug partially now.

More soon on your other points, and with kind wishes –

Alicia Wise
Director of Universal Access
@wisealic

I am “disappointed” that you say “and we readily acknowledge that systems issues are inevitable.”. This implies that you’ll wait till something happens and then fix it. Every failure has the potential to cost authors and/or readers money and that is not acceptable. It is your job to make sure failures don’t occur. If/when I find any more I reserve the right to report them in a negative way .

The latest ScholarlyKitchen features an interview http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/08/15/an-interview-with-roy-kaufman-copyright-clearance-center/ with Roy Kaufman the head of the CopyrightClearanceCenter (CCC). CCC operates the Rightslink service which charges readers for re-use of scholarly articles (“the [RL] customer is usually the publisher”) . “Founded in 1978 as a not-for-profit organization, CCC has paid more than $1.3 billion in royalties to rightsholders [publishers] over the past 10 years.”

I commenting on one paragraph (my emphasis) to which I take total exception:

Q. What does your position at CCC involve?

A. CCC’s mission involves “making copyright work.”  My role as Managing Director of New Ventures is to work on products and services that respond to market inefficiencies and failures,  real or perceived.  For example, in the UK there was a government copyright review that concluded a market failure around text and data mining, and that an exception might be needed in the copyright law.  Using this conclusion as a starting point, CCC started to ask users and publishers about text and data mining: Was it needed? Is there a market failure or inefficiency? What would be needed to correct it?  We learned there are willing buyers and willing sellers; that copyright exceptions are not the answer, but that access, lack of license normalization, and lack of content normalization across publishers is a stumbling block.  With this information, we began crafting a market-based solution.  My job is to help identify issues like this and, with the relevant teams, gather users and rightsholders to see if solutions can be built.

It is completely unjustified to state that users believe “copyright exceptions are not the answer”. Exceptions are exactly the view that the UK government has taken. Exceptions have been vigorously challenged by closed access publishers but there is no evidence that authors or users have argued against it. Copyright exceptions involve the recognition that it is legal to extract content for data analytics.

I and colleagues (below) have made a strong and consistent case for exceptions, including Licences for Europe (where we dispute the need for further licences (“market based solution”). The closed access publishers have fought this and we have been unable to continue and have withdrawn from the process. (http://www.libereurope.eu/L4Ewithdrawal ). : we wrote:

While we are deeply committed to working with the Commission on the removal of legal and other environmental barriers to TDM, we believe that any meaningful engagement on the legal framework within which data-driven innovation exists must address the issue of limitations and exceptions. The current approach of the Commission instead places licensing as the central pillar of the discussion.

Includes the signatories:

The Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), The Coalition for a Digital Economy, European Bureau of Library Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA), The Open Knowledge Foundation, Communia, Ubiquity Press Ltd., Trans‐Atlantic Consumer Dialogue, National Centre for Text Mining, University of Manchester, European Network for Copyright in support of Education and Science (ENCES), Jisc

It is therefore totally false to suggest that users have argued against exceptions. Exceptions do not require a “market-based solution” (which I suspect mean more licensing, more payment to publishers of closed access content.

Preamble: A large number of publishers now have “open access” offerings and have been actively promoting them, including on Twitter. I have been checking with several of these to see whether the “open access” is properly and labelled. Some (including Elsevier’s Cell Press and Wiley /pmr/2013/08/01/openaccess-wileys-apc-policy-is-clear-cc-by-what-about-rightslink/ ) are, some aren’t and I have tweeted results. Elsevier promoted a page of Open access publications and I investigated some of these in the same way. I found that several, from more than one journal, were badly labelled (e.g. no indication of Open Access or missing licences or ” © Elsevier All rights reserved”. In all of these I have recorded a minimum link trail, and others have duplicated my findings. I blogged this under /pmr/2013/08/14/elsevier-charges-3000-usd-apc-and-then-retains-all-rights-is-this-openaccess-no-they-then-put-it-behind-paywall-32-usd/

Yesterday I received tweets from Alicia Wise, Elsevier’s Director of Universal Access, which I reproduce and will comment on:

@petermurrayrust Peter, thanks for pointing out these issues although I continue to feel disappointed you do this in such a negative way 1/3

@petermurrayrust Today we have bottomed out 3 inter-related systems issues and are working on a full description and response to each 2/3

@petermurrayrust I will post these to the comments section of your blog when complete and also tweet a note about that post. – Alicia 3/3

There has been some twitter reaction and I include some from Chris Rusbridge one-time Director of the UK Digital Curation Centre.

@wisealic as far as I can see @petermurrayrust goes pretty dispassionately with the evidence, and has also praised successes, & corrected

@wisealic
@petermurrayrust for the amounts Elsevier is charging & its public stance, we have a RIGHT to expect it to work properly!

@wisealic
@petermurrayrust if 3 inter-related systems still need fixing months after OA is introduced, this is a MAJOR failure by #Elsevier

I await AW’s comments but add some scene-settiing.

I am doing this because the scholarly publishing market is seriously broken, as a market. There is no price sensitivity, no substitutability, no standards, and the customers (University librarians) have been completely ineffective in creating acceptable practice. Rather they accept whatever the publishers offer them. Stephen Curry has recently suggested we need regulation (http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2013/08/12/scholarly-publishing-time-for-a-regulator/ and I’ve also been urging this for some time. UK railways (11 B GBP) consumes much public money and only works because it is regulated. Scholarly publishing worldwide is a similar size and problem. If we had a regulator, they would be highlighting the current failings, not me. I am simply showing, among other things, the desperate need for accountability and regulation.

AW’s “I continue to feel disappointed you do this in such a negative way” highlights the problem. CR has agreed that Elsevier has failed massively and that is why I am massively negative. The arrogance of her remark highlights the problem – Elsevier knows it can treat customers with indifference because there is no control. In safety-critical industries such as transport or energy the failings we are seeing would have led to groundings, plant closures, questions in the house, etc. Here failings are treated casually because the industry can get away with it. My dealings with Elsevier are no different in principle from dealing with a bank or an energy supplier and I treat them with the same degree of respect and trust as I do banks and utilities.

We are apparently going to be told about systems issues. I will retain judgment, although the signs appear to be there. This isn’t the first time I have challenged them (/pmr/2013/08/12/elsevier-charges-to-read-openaccess-articles/ ). There is no public justification for systems failures.

These failures have led to:

• Authors being denied what they paid for
  
• Some customers being charge unnecessarily
  

In an industry which cares about customers the least that should be done is authors should get their money back and so should customers and they should get letters of apology. Let’s see if it happens.

Every day we get tweeted by Elsevier about their wonderful #openaccess offerings. One of the latest pointed to: http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-journals. I chose http://www.journals.elsevier.com/applied-and-translational-genomics/ to see how this worked. Note licences are discussed under http://www.elsevier.com/journals/applied-and-translational-genomics/2212-0661/guide-for-authors where they offer CC-BY, CC-BY-NC-SA and CC-BY-NC-ND. So off to a paper:

http://www.scopus.com/record/display.url?eid=2-s2.0-84870047344&origin=inward&txGid=E44AFAA8EF9CA0D9F1B2E070F4506CC1.WlW7NKKC52nnQNxjqAQrlA%3a8

At the bottom of the masthead is:

No apparent licence: © Copyright 2013 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.    

Try another: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212066113000100

No apparent licence: Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

I’m getting a pattern… http://www.scopus.com/record/display.url?eid=2-s2.0-84870059904&origin=inward&txGid=E44AFAA8EF9CA0D9F1B2E070F4506CC1.WlW7NKKC52nnQNxjqAQrlA%3a11

(This one is 8 months ago so no excuse they “haven’t quite got round to it”).

No apparent licence: © Copyright 2012 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

So very simply, Elsevier don’t seem care very much about honouring agreements they make with authors and/or they aren’t very competent at publishing. If you take 3000USD of someone and contract to apply one of three licences then you have a legal requirement to do so.

Let’s try a different journal: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/current-therapeutic-research/

And one of their featured articles

We’ll take 2:

http://www.currenttherapeuticres.com/article/S0011-393X%2813%2900009-X/abstract

Published this year, so after the journal was made Open Access. I scroll down and…

So in Elsevier’s new trumpeted Open Access journals, they not only take high APCs but also put the papers behind paywalls.

Oh, I spoke too soon:

CC-BY, but I have to pay to read it. And CC-BY with “All rights reserved”??

In some market sectors this would be criminal negligence, but because it’s scholarly publishing who cares that Elsevier is […]?

There’s a number of academic protagonists arguing that CC-NC on journals articles protects authors while CC-BY does not. (see discussion with Rosie Redfield, /pmr/2013/08/12/resale-of-openaccess-cc-by-papers-is-fully-acceptable/#comment-140831 ) I don’t believe this and it isn’t shown in practice. Until recently all major fully-OA publishers (BMC, PLoS, etc.) used CC-BY licences and there was no concern or objection. But recently legacy publishers, forced by funder pressure to offer #openaccess, offer authors a range of licences. All except CC-BY prevent commercial re-use. Is this for the author’s benefit or the publisher. I don’t know, but what I do know is that publishers can make huge amounts of money from re-use. Here’s a snapshot of re-use costs from (taken at random) the Nature publication http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n7/pdf/nbt.2626.pdf (It’s not open, but shows the scale of charges and I expect commercial use of CC-NC would be similar).

Suppose I work in a pharma company (I used to) and want to write a journal article and re-use TWO images from an NPG paper. This is normal scholarly publishing, it’s just that the author works for a pharma company. I ask for permission and get:

So if I need these images (and they may be critical in showing new effects or artifacts) I have to pay Nature. The author gets nothing (and doesn’t expect it). Nature gets nearly 1000 USD for doing nothing. (Rightslink will take a cut, I assume).

Let’s assume the company wants to show the effect of their new drug in their marketing material. And let’s assume that the effects are reported in an NPG article. Here’s what you have to pay:

7000 USD for 15,000 copies. OK it won’t hurt the pharma company, but it’s huge for Nature.

CC-BY removes Nature’s ability to charge for re-use. So all of those shouting for CC-NC on articles should realise the only effect is to increase publishers profits and reduce the amount that the article is read. I’m told, anecdotally, that one medical article generated 1 million USD in re-use rights – but I have no hard evidence (it came from someone in the publishing industry).

Authors: CC-NC serves only to increase publisher profits. Is it surprising that they offer it to authors as the first option and often cheaper?

There has been a flurry of activity about Development Policy Review and Disasters, journals “published” by the ODI. Last week Duncan Green on his / OXFAM blog http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=15465 wrote:

Yet this week I had a depressing exchange with the (usually wonderful) ODI about their journal, the Development Policy Review (no link for reasons I’ll explain). The latest issue of DPR covers transparency and accountability initiatives, and (oh the irony!) it is hidden behind a paywall: if I want to read more than the abstract, I have to fill in online forms, pay a few $, then go through the hassle of reclaiming it through Oxfam’s expenses system and anyway, I balk at paying before I know if it’s any good.  The result is (and I suspect I am fairly typical) that I move on – I either write to the author to scrounge the piece, find someone who has access eg through a university or, as in this case, read something else instead (it’s not as if development wonks are running out of reading matter).

When I complained via twitter, ODI directed me to an FAQ page on their website which explains:

“ODI does not hold copyright for articles in ODI’s two peer-reviewed journals, Development Policy Review and Disasters, so cannot directly publish these with open access.

And Nick Scott from ODI replied http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=15525

…the associated Twitter conversations – included exhortations to ‘just do it’. But I wish it were as easily done as it is said. As someone who has been working hard to make ODI a leader in embracing the digital age (and other think tanks too, through the WonkComms initiative) it feels uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of barbs about a ‘legacy tail’ or belonging to bygone eras. The reality is that if we could quickly and easily move our journals to full and open access whilst maintaining their research quality and sustainability, we would’ve done it.

What the ‘pay wall‘ pays for

ODI’s peer reviewed journals curate brilliant research from around the world. Subscription costs and single article purchases cover the costs of processing, reviewing and publishing this work.

ODI uses its share of income to cover editorial and some administration – and we aim to run at cost. We review hundreds of submissions, co-ordinate a complicated peer review process, copy edit, proof and commission articles. It is not an insubstantial task.

We work with a publisher (Wiley Blackwell) to run our journals because it would be madness not to. They know what they’re doing when it comes to online publication, subscription management, the printing and mailing of hard copies for institutions and individuals – a proportion of whom don’t (and often can’t) access journals online. We wouldn’t be able to do this stuff ourselves very efficiently.

Finding a six-figure sum to cover the full editorial, production and management costs every year is not something anyone can just do. ODI and other organisations running journals cannot reduce costs without impacting quality. The essence of peer-reviewed journals is their guarantee of quality – lose that and you might as well shut them down completely.

This is an example of what I call the #scholarlypoor – the people all over the world who are not in a rich university. Of course we centre on citizens of developing countries – HINARI is not an answer – but also on many others. If you are in policy making areas (government, NGOs) climate, disease, etc you need access to this knowledge and you probably can’t get it for free – you must pay or act illegally. So the fundamental question for the ODI is:

Why are you publishing these journals anyway?

ODI says: Development Policy Review is an ODI journal focused on the crucial link between research and policy. As an international, peer-reviewed journal, it is an indispensable tool for researchers and policy-makers alike. The journal publishes single articles and themed issues on topics at the forefront of current international debate and is published in association with Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.

If it’s to reach those who ought to be reached it’s failing. It can be argued that an academic publishes for their own benefit, not the community (I don’t but some do). But a non-profit Development Organisation has a duty to reach everyone.

“It would be madness not to [work with Wlley]”. Rubbish. There are many journals published with no subscription and no author charges. It takes effort and commitment but that’s what the ODI is about, surely? It’s actually madness that the ODI, which actually publishes a lot of material other than journals, cannot publish a journal. Look at J. Machine Learning Research (jmlr.org, which has no author fees or reader fees). It’s at the top of its field (whereas yours is half way down). You have an organisation designed for managing information. You have all the advantages.

So I have the following suggestions:

Short-term. Collect all the author manuscripts you already have (since YOU manage them) and publish them as Green Open Access. You will find no shortage of repositories who will host this. If Wiley object, tell the world. This is knowledge designed to better the world.

Medium term. Create an OA journal. This is not as difficult as it sounds. The software to run it is free, there is no subscription management required, no paywall software, no lawyers to threaten people who want open knowledge. Cameron Neylon thinks it costs 250 GBP per published article to do a good job of peer-review. You have economies of scale.

You publish 6 articles/month approx. That’s, say 100 articles a year. Take Cameron’s figure that’s 25, 000 GBP/year. I think that’s reasonable.

Now canvas funders – foundations interested in open knowledge – SPARC has funded some startup initiatives, so have JISC. Talk to the new association of UK Open Access publishers. They’ll give you lots of useful advice. Talk to Cameron (sorry Cameron!). Talk to OKFN. And, if it’s any help I’ll be happy to talk.

Long term. Then set your sights high. Think of yourself as a way of making Open Access happen. You’re in the centre. Think of ODI as an OA publishing hub. You can help others to create OA outlets.

It would be madness not to

Chris Sakkas (Admin of the FOSsil Bank wiki and the Living Libre blog and Twitter feed.) has worked hard to collate current usage of terms in the free/open/libre domains. As readers of this blog will know there is wide variation in usage, some of it constructive, some of it deliberately obfuscatory. He writes:

Hi folks,

This is the first release of A Free, Libre and Open Glossary, which as you hopefully know by now defines terms like ‘free software’, ‘crowdsourcing’, ‘open access’ and so on. Thank you to everyone here who contributed advice and changes.

The Etherpad still exists as a living document. The PDF and ODT available for download are best thought of as a fork of the living document to put the glossary in an accessible, nicely-formatted and tightly-edited form. 

Download the PDF and ODT here:

http://goo.gl/i32jPv

Read and contribute to the living document:

http://okfnpad.org/UEVd4jV2cB

This is really valuable. If you don’t agree with his analysis there is a chance to feed back.

Here are some excerpts:

Free, libre and open (FLO)

The words ‘free’, ‘libre’ and ‘open’ are used synonymously or together

(F/O or FLO) to describe works that can be shared and adapted by any

person for any purpose without infringing copyright law. There may be

conditions to this use attached, if those conditions do not limit how the

work can be shared and adapted or who can share and adapt it.

This fairly simple definition is complicated by the number of terms

that describe the same or slightly different concept, such as free

software, open source software, open content and free cultural works.

In some cases, these terms are more restrictive: a work can be under a

FLO licence but not qualify as a free cultural work or open knowledge.

…

Making works FLO

There are three ways that a work might become FLO.

Statute

A piece of legislation could grant permissions outside of normal

copyright law. The most obvious example is the public domain, which

describes works outside of the area of copyright restrictions.

For a work to qualify as FLO, it must be usable by any person. Works

that are in the public domain in only some countries will not qualify.

Licence

There are hundreds of FLO licences. The benefits of such licences are

that they are ideally unambiguous and they apply in all jurisdictions.

Declaration

Some people simply express their intention that a work is free from

some or all copyright restrictions. They may not be interested in

applying a licence or may reject legalistic culture altogether.

A modern example is Nina Paley’s Copyheart:

” Copying is an act of love. Please copy.” (♡http://copyheart.org/)

These declarations are dangerous because their legal status is unclear.

Can it be reneged upon later (perhaps by inheritors)?

Folk musician Woodie Guthrie included a notice on his recordings:

‘This song is Copyrighted in U.S. … and anybody caught singin it

without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we

don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We

wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do’.

A number of organisations still claim copyright over Guthrie’s songs.

…

a FLO licence cannot diminish existing rights and permissions. For example, the Open

Game License allows you to use content from the Dungeons & Dragons

roleplaying game, but only if you don’t use certain words like ‘yuan-ti’

and ‘illithid’. Since these words are not protected by copyright law, this

is an additional requirement—making the licence non-FLO.

…

Open access

There are two competing definitions of open access:

The broader one:

an open access work is a scholarly book or article that is available online for any person to access without charge.

The narrow definition of open access, established at the Budapest

Open Access Initiative: an open access work is one that is available

online for any person to access, distribute or use in any other way

without financial, legal or technical barriers and with no constraints

except those of the integrity of the work and attribution.

The latter definition effectively requires that open access works be

FLO. Unfortunately, the former definition has gained widespread

acceptance, and it is the one used throughout this glossary.

‘Gratis open access’ refers to baseline open access.

‘Libre open access’ has been used to refer to open access works that have fewer

copyright restrictions. Note that this is a loose use of ‘libre’: a work that

could only be shared noncommercially or verbatim would be ‘libre open

access’ even though it is not libre by standard usage.

‘Green open access’ describes a work that has been self-archived by

the author in a repository or on a website, after having been published

in the traditional way.

‘Gold open access’

describes a work that is immediately made available by its publisher.

Relationship to FLO:

Open access works are not necessarily FLO. They can be all rights reserved. While many FLO works are open access,

not all of them are. For example, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike periodical

Fantastique Unfettered is FLO, but not available online or for no charge.

So if you believe that terminology should be carefully chosen, the this is a really valuable resource. And if you don’t agree with bits, help to change it.

I’m on the OKFN advisory board on the Open Definition which also oversees licences, their openness and compatibility. I am really impressed by the other members (I normally have little to contribute!)

What happens when you want to edit a licenced document and republish it? It depends on the licence. Leigh Dodds on the OD Board has compiled (updated) a very useful resource on licence compatibility.
[1]. http://theodi.org/blog/exploring-compatibility-between-data-licences
[2]. https://github.com/theodi/open-data-licensing/blob/master/guides/licence-compatibility.md
[3]. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiswT8ko8hb4dEJ6VVhYamlNMWo5WHpSV3IzVzAtZkE&usp=sharing

The problem is that some licences allow editing and modification, and also relicensing, and others don’t. You can convert a CC0 document into a CC-BY-NC one, but you can’t reverse the process. With N licences there are NxN options so it’s useful to use a matrix: http://clipol.org/clipol_dodds_compare.png

Here’s a snippet. CC is Creative Commons and ODC is Open Data Commons http://opendatacommons.org/ from OKFN. CC is the predominant licence in academia; ODC is widely used in government.

Notice immediately that CC-NC-ND cannot be edited or transformed and cannot be converted to any other licence. By contrast CC-BY can be edited and relicensed under any CC licence except CC0.

Licensing is non-trivial. If you try to write one or modify one, however well intentioned, you will almost certainly get it wrong (we debate a number of cases where this has happened and try to decide whether it’s compatible with the Open Definition. So please re-use a licence wherever possible rather than hack your own.

Prompted by the an (author) tweet on a new openaccess paper from CUP I went to http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8966489 .

I have no idea whether this was APC-paid, but’s it’s “Open Access” under the CC-BY-NC-SA licence (i.e. non-commercial). The PDF is similarly labelled.

Can I use it for teaching? I follow the Request permissions:

So Cambridge University (of which CUP is an integral part) charge lecturers to re-use Open Access material.

But why is it left to me to highlight this inequity? The University libraries have an interest in making materials available for teaching, don’t they? They should already have noted the problem and challenged it. They have to show they take this seriously