From: "Kiley, Robert" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:32:23 +0100

Heather, I strongly disagree with your assertion that an "NC" licence
is better than the CC-BY licence.

Let me give you a couple of examples where the "NC" licence has the
potential to limit what others can do with the research we have
funded.

Translation example

**
We publish a lot of research on malaria.  It is possible that someone
may wish to take a number of these papers and translate them into,
say, Burmese so the information can be understood and applied in the
local context.  The organisation doing the translation however, may
wish to charge for this "value added" service.  For articles published
under the NC licence, this would not be possible.

I fully understand that some users may not be able to afford the
value-added translation, but I fail to see how they are any worse off
(as they can still access the original research in its original
language.)  However, others may be able to afford it and thus reap the
benefits of the value-added service.

Posting research on another web site

**
To maximise the impact of the research we fund we want people to be
able to find it and use this content.  As such, if someone wants to
take an article (which reported the outcome of Trust-funded research)
and post it on another web site we believe that this this should be
possible (as long as the work is properly attributed).  However, if
that other web site carried any form of advertising then that would
almost certainly be construed as "commercial", and the publisher could
ask for that article to be taken down.

More generally, advertising is now commonplace in an environment that
encourages open information like never before:  the Wiki community,
blogs and, analogously, open source software sources, all generate
revenue from advertising in order to encourage sharing and
dissemination of the free content.

The bottom line of this is that we want to maximise the availability
and use of research outputs in order to achieve greatest health/public
benefit, and believe that the CC-BY licence provides the best
mechanism for achieving this.

Consequently, in line with the draft RCUK policy, the Wellcome Trust
will also be requiring a CC-BY licence when it pays an OA publication
fee.  We are currently working through the implementation of this
measure and will make full details available to our publishing
colleagues in due course.

Best regards
Robert



-----Original Message-----
From: Heather Morrison <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 12:06:00 -0700

Some open access advocates insist on a narrow definition of open
access as equivalent to the Creative Commons Attribution-Only license.
Jan Velterop recently made this point in Liblicense under the thread
Predatory Open Access Journals in CHE:
http://listserv.crl.edu/wa.exe?A2=ind1203&L=LIBLICENSE-L&F=&S=&P=62827

As a long term open access activist and scholar, I have given this
matter quite a bit of thought. With all due respect to my OA advocate
colleagues, I do not believe that CC-BY is the best option even for
strong (libre) forms of open access, and I would argue for a broader,
more inclusive definition at any rate. In brief, my view is that while
CC-BY superficially appears to be the expression of the BOAI
definition of open access, in practice it has weaknesses that are
problematic for open access. For this reason, it is my opinion that
the best CC license for libre open access is Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike (CC-BY-NC-SA), as this protects
open access downstream. I recognize that the current CC-NC definition
is overly broad and hence problematic. However, I argue that the
solution is for CC to improve the license rather than abandoning the
noncommercial option.

One of the reasons why I think CC-BY-NC-SA is actually a better fit
with BOAI than CC-BY is because it would be more effective to achieve
the vision of BOAI, e.g. "the sharing of the poor with the rich and
the rich with the poor" than CC-BY. That is, CC-BY allows for the
creation of for-pay derivatives that the CC-BY author (or their
family, community, or country) could not afford. This would in effect
be a one-way sharing of the poor with the rich. For this reason, I
always recommend the use of NC for open access authors and publishers
in the developing world.

My argument is presented in more detail in the third chapter of my
draft dissertation, which can be found here:
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/open-thesis-draft-introduction-march-2011/
(search for open access and creative commons)

While I argue that CC-BY-NC-SA is the best available license for the
strongest form of open access, I also argue for a broader, more
inclusive definition of open access. Free to read online with no other
rights is a tremendous improvement over toll access that people cannot
afford. One of Willinsky's most basic points in The Access Principle
is exactly this broad, inclusive approach to open access. Authors,
publishers, universities and research funders around the world work in
many different contexts and it is not clear that there is a single
approach that actually makes sense for everyone. Some publishers and
journals work in areas where research funding is relatively plentiful
and the grant amounts generally large enough to cover article
processing fees. In other areas of scholarship, funding is less
frequent and less generous. Some journals in these areas may be just
barely covering costs with their subscriptions revenue and reluctant
to move to full, immediate, libre open access for valid reasons. When
these journals choose partial OA measures such as free access to back
issues, that is a very fine thing. If we wish these journals to move
to stronger forms of open access, I would suggest that it would be
appropriate to find means of helping them figure out economic
solutions to support a transition. If their chosen model is
problematic, we should point this out and explain what the problem is.
For example, Elsevier's Sponsored Articles is an expensive option
which is essentially a copyright transfer to the publisher which
leaves the author with

In my blogspot, Articulating the Commons, I I argue that we do not yet
have a complete answer to the question of how best to share our works,
and that rather than rushing to find a solution, it would be optimal
to open up a discussion to take place over many decades, around the
world, involving as many people who are interested and willing to
contribute, and taking into account a wide variety of perspectives,
including non-western perspectives.
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2011/12/articulating-commons-leaderful-approach.html

This topic has generated some lively discussion recently on the SPARC
Open Access Forum, the open science list, scholcomm, and google's G+,
in case anyone wishes to delve into the details of the debates.

best,

Heather Morrison, MLIS