Monday, October 15, 2012

Creative Commons and Open Access Critique series

This is a series of posts critiquing the trend towards adopting a particular CC license as a standard for open access. My own views are that we don't know what the best approach for sharing scholarly and other types of work will be in the future, and cannot know until we spend some time thinking and trying things out. By "time", I mean decades, or centuries. This view is expressed most clearly in the post Articulating the commons: a leaderful approach. This topic is also addressed, although not in full, in the defense draft of my thesis Freedom for Scholarship in the Internet Age (see the open access chapter and the conclusion).

Ceased and transferred publications and archiving: best practices and room for improvement

Provides evidence that current best practices of open access publishers for ceased journals (keep journal on list, archive content, provide explanation for readers) has room for improvement. The CLOCKSS archive (part of best practice) illustrates some common misperceptions of CC licenses (e.g. the licenses per se do not accomplish archiving; there is confusion about how owns the copyright and hence is the licensor - CLOCKSS itself (dangerous; this actually adds an additional layer of copyright); journal / publisher (problematic if not all content is CC licensed); author copyright, although frequently referred to in OA practice, is not mentioned.

Editorial: open access, copyright and licensing: basics for open access publishers 

Author copyright in name only 
The Elsevier website provides a clear example of how author copyright can be in name only, with all rights other than nominal transferred to the publisher.

Open access publishing: current issues in copyright and licensing
 This is a post for recording some of the issues I come across in the May 2015 OA APC survey.

A case for strong fair use / fair dealing with restrictive licenses for scholarship
One of the problems with the push for ubiquitous CC-BY is that it overlooks the needs of scholars to include works that are not scholarly in nature. If every scholarly article in the world were released as CC-BY, this would not only not be helpful to the communication scholar needing to include excerpts of commercially valuable or sensitive works, it would likely make it even more difficult to obtain permission to use this kind of material.

Creative Commons CC-BY confusions.Describes a CC mixter discussion about whether it is legal and/or ethical to sell compilations of CC-BY licensed songs, and whether the community understands the implications when licensing their work.

Chang vs. Virgin Mobile: the photo of a young minor age woman is posted CC-BY to flickr, becomes part of an advertising campaign without the family's knowledge or permission. Legal battles ensue.

The commercial overlords of scholarly rewrite copyright licenses to suit themselves

The Elsevier "open access" / exclusive license to publish hybrid

Rosie Redfield has posted results of an author survey and some of her own critique on RRResearch

Attitudes and values regarding research dissemination and licenses

Is DOAJ inadvertently promoting publisher power over scholars?

A problem with CC-BY: permitting downstream use with no strings attached is the toll access model

Wikipedia, scholarship and CC-BY

A simple definition for open access: a proposal to open the discussion 

UK BIS Committee submission

flickr and Creative Commons: the popularity of noncommercial

Why CC-BY will sometimes be a violation of research ethics

CC-BY: the wrong goal for open access, and neither necessary nor sufficient for data and text mining

PLooS, or contemplating new IJPE series: poking fun at CC-BUY

CC-BY - and/or versus - open access?

Dear Creative Commons: please drop the gratuitous insult

Are strict CC-BY publishers shooting themselves in the foot?

Copyright for expression of ideas; patent law for ideas

Research Councils UK draft new open access policy: my comments

A way of saying "this is open access"

PLoS ONE is in the lead - but could a well thought out noncommercial approach give a competitor an edge?

Should we copyleft our personal information - including our bodies?

Let's raise the floor - a proposal for Creative Commons

Is the OJS simple statement of open access enough, or should we do away with academic copyright altogether?

Why require attribution? A Creative Commons discussion item

Noncommercial means noncommercial (creative commons discussion)

Journals with good Creative Commons models

Three pictures, one small gift, to everyone, with love

To everyone, with love

Creative Commons, noncommercial and formats

Articulating the commons: a leaderful approach

Creative Commons and noncommercial: CC 4.0 discussion

Education is a public good - not a commercial activity!

Dissension in the open access ranks on CC licenses and strategy tips for publishers