Thursday, December 31, 2015

Dramatic Growth of Open Access December 2015

Highlights

After a year or so of slower growth at DOAJ to accommodate back-end technical work and a new get-tough policy on journal inclusion, robust DOAJ growth is back on track. In the last quarter of 2015, DOAJ added a total of 384 titles or more than 4 titles per day for a year-end total of 10,963 journals. The number of articles searchable at the article level grew by over 300,000 in 2015 for a year-end total of over 2.1 million. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine figures demonstrate the overall growth of (mostly) open access repositories, adding more than 15 million documents in 2015 for a total of more than 84 million and adding 671 content providers for a total of just under 4 thousand content providers. Both document growth and content provider growth at BASE reflects greater than 20% growth for 2015, a particularly impressive number given that percentage growth tends to favour newer, smaller initiatives such as the SCOAP3 repository which had the highest growth by percentage in 2015, more than doubling to over 8,000 articles in 2015. Although not all the documents available via a BASE search are open access, the more than 3.7 million items now available for free from PubMedCentral alone is just one indication of robust growth in open access repositories. The Internet Archive now has more than 8.8 million texts. Perhaps even more impressive is that over 8 million of the texts made available by the Internet Archive and Open Library are fully accessible and in the public domain! Following are a few charts to illustrate the ongoing amazing growth of open access. To sum up, only one resolution is recommended for all the people behind the thousands of open access journals, repositories and other services for 2016: keep up the good work!

Open data is available through the Dramatic Growth of Open Access dataverse. For previous posts see the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.







Top 10 by percentage growth

2014 2015 Annual growth (numeric) Annual growth (percentage)
SCOAP3 articles 4,329 8,934 4,605 106%
DOAB publishers 79 134 55 70%
DOAB books 2,482 3,789 1,307 53%
Highwire Completely Free Sites 113 160 47 42%
PMC journals some articles OA 338 423 85 25%
BASE documents 68,575,068 84,250,153 15,675,085 23%
Internet Archive Audio Recordings 2,224,696 2,712,703 488,007 22%
PMC journals selected articles OA 2,897 3,499 602 21%
BASE content providers 3,294 3,965 671 20%
Internet Archive Texts 7,320,065 8,756,735 1,436,670 20%

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Dramatic Growth of Open Access June 30, 2015

This issue of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access highlights and celebrates samples of the many small milestones illustrating the slow and steady increase in open access (dramatic does not necessarily mean fast!).

There are now more than 2,000 journals actively participating in PubMedCentral. Over the past year, this number grew by 178 - that's close to one more new entire journal actively contributing content to PMC every business day.

PMC now has over 3.5 million items. This means that about 15% of all the 24 million items cited in PMC (regardless of date of publication) have free fulltext available linked from PubMed.

In the last 7 years, the number of NIH funded articles indexed in PubMed (again regardless of date of publication) available for free grew from 86 thousand to over 600 thousand or from 34% to 71%.
 






















 
Other small milestones: there are now over 100 publishers of open access scholarly books listed in the Directory of Open Access Books; the Social Sciences Research Network now includes over half a million full text papers; the Registry of Open Access Repositories now lists over 4,000 repositories; and the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine now has more than 75 million documents. Congratulations and thanks to everyone who is doing all the behind-the-scenes work that results in this dramatic increase in access to our knowledge (whether your initiative is highlighted this particular issue or not). To download the data go to the DGOA dataverse.





Selected data

Directory of Open Access Journals is going through a clean-up project; the number of journals listed decreased by 45 this semester (over the past year growth of 471 titles). Journals and articles searchable by article both grew this quarter.

The Directory of Open Access Books lists 3,197 titles from 107 publishers; over 50% annual growth for both numbers.

The Electronic Journals Library added 801 journals that can be read free-of-charge for a total approaching 50,000 titles.

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine added more than 3.6 million documents for a total over over 75 million documents.

This quarter PubMedCentral added the following (journal rather than article data). A key point is that increases are happening consistently in every category.

  • 33 journals actively participating in PMC (total over 2,000)
  • 23 journals with immediate free access (total 1,468)
  • 24 journals with all articles open access (total 1,260)
  • 46 journals that deposit ALL content in PMC (total 1,683)
  • 9 more journals that deposit NIH-funded content only (total 310)
  • 268 journals that deposit selected content in PMC (total 3,246)
arXiv added over 25,000 publications and now has more than a million. 

RePEC added over 64 thousand downloadable items for a total of over 1.6 million. The Logec service has lots of great stats (downloads, content by type and by date); highly recommended for anyone looking for more detail in this area.

Social Sciences Research Network added close to 13 thousand fulltextpapers for a total of more than half a million.

Internet Archive added:
  • 100,000 movies for a total of over 2 million
  • 4,000 concerts for a total of 153 thousand
  • 100,000 audio recordings for a total of over 2.5 million
  • 300,000 texts for a total of over 8 millio
This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series. Note that the dataverse has been cleaned up a little to make it easier to find the current file.

♡2015 by Heather Morrison. Copying is an act of love. Please copy. (from Copyheart).

Tuesday, June 02, 2015

Terms and conditions: copy and share with love

Updated June 26, 2017

Please copy and share with love

What does this mean? In brief, I have no interest in using intellectual property law to prevent anyone from using or re-using my work with intentions such as furthering the collective knowledge of humanity (truth with justice and compassion), protecting or restoring the environment or making the conditions of life of humanity better. That is what I mean by with love. If your motives in using my work are something other than love, such as making a profit for yourself or a corporation that you work for, subverting truth, justice, or compassion, then note that I reserve all rights under copyright. Please use attribution as appropriate. For example, if you use my work in an academic or journalist context, you need to acknowledge me as author in order to avoid plagiarism (and confusion).

An earlier statement on this general topic follows. As of June 26, 2017, copy and share with love prevails.

As of June 2, 2015, these are the terms and conditions for this blog:

All Rights Reserved except as indicated otherwise. Open sharing is something that I strongly believe in, and so I would like to encourage others to use my own work in noncommercial ways. Please note that when I have copied the works of other people, the copyright belongs to them, not me; I have no rights to grant to you. If you would like to copy my work, please go ahead and do so, but be sure to indicate that the portion of my work you have copied is under my copyright and attribute me and this blog:

© Heather Morrison, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics [insert URL to post]. All Rights Reserved.

I request that you let me know what you have done (a comment on this post is fine if you don't have my e-mail; if you're doing this just to communicate and don't want your comment made public, just let me know). You don't have to ask my permission first, but I would like to know if people are interested in re-using my work, and if so how (this is topic I am interested in), so I appreciate it if people do ask.

Note that you may have rights under fair dealing or fair use that go beyond the permissions I grant here. I encourage you to make full use of your fair dealing / fair use rights. Canada has a good fair dealing regime at the moment thanks to a series of 2012 Supreme Court decisions in favour of fair dealings. I strongly support the fair dealing rights as outlined by the Canadian Association of University Teachers.  If your country does not have fair use / fair dealing, advocacy for these rights would be a good idea. Note that when I have used the works of others in this blog, this is almost always making use of my fair dealing rights, e.g. to copy the portions of works of others in order to critique.

If you use CC licenses, you should note that when using the works of others you should check for license compatibility, and alert readers to the rights of third parties. Even when one CC licensed works is included in a second work with what appears to be exactly the same license, the Licensor (generally the copyright holder) for the upstream work is different and hence there are actually two different licenses (for example, the attribution and moral rights of the copied work remain with the original Licensor).

This is important to understand to minimize your legal risk in copying the work of others. More than 99% of my work has never been licensed for blanket downstream commercial uses, for example. If people use my work in their own works that are CC licensed without the NC element, they risk giving the impression that the copied work is available to others for commercial use. If someone downstream takes advantage of this commercial downstream use that I did not authorize and I decide to take legal action, the downstream user will probably drag the person or organization using an inappropriate CC license into court. This is appropriate because if your site or work is telling others that a work is available for commercial use downstream, then the downstream commercial user is acting in good faith and it is in fact you who are at fault.  I think the odds are very remote that I'd ever take anyone to court over a copyright claim; rather, I want to alert well-intentioned people to the risks that they are taking when including third party works in other works with broad liberal licenses.

Update June 3: in response to an anonymous question, in case this is relevant for anyone else:  if you are preparing a court case and believe that anything in this blog can be useful to support your case, of course you can do so. I appreciate your letting me know, but you don't have to ask permission. This is the kind of use that either is, or ought to be, covered by fair use / fair dealing. You have a right to whatever information can help you in a court case. You should indicate the copyright and where you got the information from.  This is more important in terms of presenting your case in the best possible light than protecting my copyright. If you present this work as expert evidence, you need to document where you got the information from, and why you think the author is an expert in this field. It might be helpful to refer to my work web page in this context. Whether your court case is intended to support a commercial argument for you is not relevant. The primary meaning of commercial rights with respect to copyright is selling the work. Ideas are not covered by copyright; for this reason, using the ideas in a copyrighted work does require commercial rights permissions.


From 2004 until June 1, 2015, this blog, or to be more accurate, my own work on this blog was licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License. If you copied work during this time frame, this license cannot be revoked, however from June 2, 2015 on this blog is no longer licensed under CC. This includes works published previously if you are reading or copying after June 2nd. For those who did copy before this date, I have copied the human readable terms below for your convenience.

Why the change?

Here are my experiences with more than a decade of encouraging blanket re-use:


  • one instance of plagiarism (a chart copied from my blog without permission), obviously not intentional and corrected through education
  • one instance of a work copied from my blog to a venue that I want nothing to do with, with inaccurate and insulting attribution (modified somewhat with education)
  • one instance of friendly re-use of a work by a friend, technically illegal since it was a different license and I'm pretty sure my friend was just making a point about re-use. Nice, but not a good use of the time of my friend who is a brilliant scholar and has better things to do.
  • one person wanted to use one of my charts in a powerpoint, but the web version is not sufficient so had to request a higher quality image anyways
  • if there have been uses that would have convinced me this was a good idea, I don't know about them; that's a problem with blanket downstream rights for whoever
As a junior scholar, it is helpful to me to be able to prove that others consider my work worthwhile. That's why I would like you to tell me if you re-use my work; this is for my tenure dossier. 
 Creative Commons licensing now includes instructions on what is and isn't a free culture license. Apparently my choices are not free culture. This is technique some call deprecation (intended to push people towards the free culture licenses) that I think is more accurately called bullying or insulting.  This is one of the reasons I stopped voluntarily using CC licenses for new works some time ago.

Creative Commons has done some awesome work, and I still think it's great to have an option to indicate we want to share rather than automatic copyright. However, I am concerned that this approach actually encourages permissions culture, asking people to think about everything that we do as IP. My current thinking is that it would be better to advocate for strong fair use / fair dealing rights everywhere, push for shorter not longer copyright terms and eliminate automatic copyright. I might be back someday CC if I sense an atmosphere a bit more tolerant of the different choices about licensing people choose to make.

CC-BY-NC-SA terms for people who copied portions of my own works on or before June 1, 2105 follow. Note that where I have copied the works of others, the copyright remains theirs, not mine.

You are free to:

  • Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
  • The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

Under the following terms:

  • AttributionYou must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
  • Non-Commercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
  • ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
  • No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Notices:

  • You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.
  • No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.




Friday, May 22, 2015

Author copyright in name only

The Elsevier website provides language illustrating clearly how author copyright can be virtually identical to a copyright transfer.

From the Elsevier Copyright page, under For Open Access Articles:

Authors sign an exclusive license agreement, where authors have copyright but license exclusive rights in their article to the publisher**. In this case authors have the right to:
  • Share their article in the same ways permitted to third parties under the relevant user license (together with Personal Use rights) so long as it contains a CrossMark logo, the end user license, and a DOI link to the version of record on ScienceDirect.
  • Retain patent, trademark and other intellectual property rights (including raw research data).
  • Proper attribution and credit for the published work.
**This includes the right for the publisher to make and authorize commercial use, please see the "Rights granted to Elsevier" tab for more details.

Comments

The copyright may be in the author's name, but clearly the author has signed away all rights. The only rights that remain for the author are those "permitted to third parties". The author has become a third party with respect to their own work.

Patent, trademark and other IP rights are not part of copyright. It is deceptive for Elsevier to post these here as if Elsevier had these rights to grant.

This post is part of the Creative Commons and Open Access Critique series.



Thursday, May 21, 2015

mBio: a good model for language explaining what's covered by noncommercial use

mBIO has excellent language on their website http://mbio.asm.org/site/misc/authors.xhtml
explaining what they mean to exclude and include by using a CC noncommercial license. This could be model for others so copied in full below. The first part is copied directly from the CC website, a good practice which avoid errors in interpretation that would be possible with paraphrasing.

ASM publishes mBio articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. The author(s) retains copyright under this license. Others may adapt, reorganize, and build upon the published work for noncommercial purposes, as long as credit to the author and original article is given, and the new work, which includes the previously published content, is licensed under identical terms.
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike


Noncommercial reuse is defined as use that is not intended for or directed toward commercial advantage. This would include the following:

  • Content requested by an academic or educational institution
  • Content requested by a not-for-profit publisher if not for resale
  • Content requested for use by the government
  • Content requested for a thesis or coursepack
  • Author request to use his/her own material

Individuals seeking to obtain permission for commercial reuse of mBio journal content may do so through the Rightslink web-based permissions and commercial reprint system. To use Rightslink, on the mBio website search for the journal article containing the content which you would like to reuse and then click on the "Reprints and Permissions" link that appears on the journal table of contents or within the article content box.

Commercial reuse applies if the content being requested will be distributed for a fee or by an organization legally recognized as a commercial entity (demonstrated, for example, by payment of taxes, incorporation, or support by advertising/corporate sponsorship). This includes:
  • Commercial/for-profit publishers
  • Companies or organizations representing or interfacing with a for-profit pharmaceutical organization (e.g., content to be reused to promote or advertise a pharmaceutical product)
  • Medical device companies
  • PR/Advertising/Medical communications agency/Media 

This post is part of the Creative Commons and Open Access critique series.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Growth in CC-BY: numbers and critique.

According to a recent post by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, 543,611 articles were published by open access-only journal using CC-BY licenses between 2000 and 2014, with 141,232 of these articles published in 2014 alone.

It is wonderful to see the growth of open access publishing, and kudos to these journals publishing with what they believe is the best license for open access.

Critique

CC-BY licenses permit blanket downstream commercial use as well as derivatives. I argue that the larger the corpus of works licensed CC-BY and the easier it is to gather such works (e.g. using robots to search metadata), the greater the temptation becomes for new commercial players to make use of these downstream rights. None of the CC licenses require that works be made available free-of-charge. It is possible that we'll end up paying for access to these works that are now free-of-charge and/or paying for downstream value-added services - or do without these benefits if we cannot afford them. For example, there is nothing about CC licenses to indicate that downstream users of works created by researchers in poorer regions have a right to benefit from access to downstream derivatives. Third world medical researchers and funders could be shut out of point-of-care tools created using the works that they have given away, for example.

The emphasis on open access only journals does not appear to welcome or encourage conversion of traditional journals to open access. There are still many journals publishing in print or both print and online. The members of societies publishing such journals in some cases still want the print versions. Any journal with a history of more than about 10 years predates Creative Commons and would have to undertake a major re-licensing effort to have a journal-wide CC license. It is good to see a strong and growing open access publishing community, but it is important to recognize that members of OASPA are organizations, often commercial in nature, that have their own business interests.

Finally, not every journal with a CC license can be described as having a journal-wide CC license. If a journal has been publishing for 10 years and initiates CC licensing for future issues, this does not change the license for back issues. Even for many journals and publishers with the strongest commitment to a CC license, there can be individual works and/or third party works in the journal that are not under this license.

This post is part of the Creative Commons and Open Access Critique series.


Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Open access publishing: current issues in copyright and licensing

The purpose of this post is to record some of the issues I come across in the May 2015 survey of open access article processing charges relating to copyright and licensing. Copyright note: in this post I copy a lot of text from publisher websites. In doing so, I am drawing on my rights under fair dealing to copy portions of works for academic research and critique. I can do this even with works that are All Rights Reserved. However I cannot re-license the works of others. Language below from publisher websites is not covered under the IJPE CC-BY-NC-SA license. This illustrates one of the problems with looking for the simplicity of licensing at the level of whole works. My CC license may give a downstream user the incorrect impression that they are free to use these portions of works that are not under my copyright. This could pose problems for the downstream user, the publisher, and for me. If we want to push policies that demand licensing at the whole work level, this would make this type of work a lot more difficult if not impossible. I'd have to ask permission to use CC licenses for the publishers' work; I can imagine that this might be difficult when the reason I am doing this is to critique the publishers' practice. The other option is to omit these works, which is actually a loss of the re-use rights we have under fair dealing. Good copyright policies, practices and laws aren't just about Creative Commons. I argue that we need to defend, protect and expand our rights under fair dealing. 

Update July 4: Bentham Open: authors retain copyright, but clearly Bentham Open considers itself to be the Licensor of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License. This illustrates two common confusions in open access publishing: author copyright retention which is nominal in nature (see below for other examples), and when Creative Commons licensing is used, who is the Licensor. In order to grant rights under copyright, one must first have the rights to grant. Bentham Open is clearly expecting a broad-based author copyright rights transfer that is very similar to full copyright transfer. 

In the publishers' words (from
--> http://www.benthamopen.com/editorial-policies.php section 13, copyright, viewed May 17, 2015):
  
--> Authors who publish in Bentham OPEN journals retain copyright to their work. Submission of a manuscript to the respective journals implies that all authors have read and agreed  
-->
  1. Bentham OPEN (Licensor) grants the author(s) a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and non-commercial perpetual license to exercise the rights in the article published as stated below:
1.     All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the work is properly cited.
2.     The authors retain the copyright of their published article. They will also have the right to:
1.     Reproduce the article, to incorporate the article into one or more collective works, and to reproduce the article as incorporated in collective works;
2.     Create and reproduce Derivative Works for educational purposes.
3.     Distribute Copies
4.     Any commercial application of the work, with prior agreement by the author, is exclusively granted to Bentham OPEN
                  Waiver: Authors grant to Bentham OPEN (licensor) the right to retain all revenue from commercial sales of the author's published article in a Bentham OPEN journal.
                  Bentham OPEN offers affordable article processing fees, ranking amongst the lowest as compared to those of other OPEN access journal publishers. An article-processing fee payable by the author/ author's institution applies for every accepted article, to cover the costs incurred by OPEN access publication. Members of Bentham OPEN are entitled to discounted article processing fees.
                  Authors can self-archive post prints of their published articles.
                  Authors can reproduce derivative works of the article for educational purposes and distribute its copies.
Update May 28: Environmental Health Perspectives is published by the U.S. government and hence is in the public domain. Note the language about third party works - portions of articles taken from works copyrighted by others do not become public domain when published in EHP.

Copyright, Reproduction, and Citation

EHP is a publication of the U.S. Government. Publication of EHP lies in the public domain and is therefore without copyright. All text from EHP may be reprinted freely. Use of materials published in EHP should be acknowledged (for example, “Reproduced with permission from Environmental Health Perspectives”); pertinent reference information should be provided for the article from which the material was reproduced. Articles from EHP, especially the News section, may contain photographs or figures copyrighted by other commercial organizations or individuals that may not be used without obtaining prior approval from the holder of the copyright. For further information, contact EHP Permissions...from http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/instructions-to-authors/


Update May 28: the Oxford Open license mixes up CC-BY and CC-BY noncommercial, says "compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution Licence" then shortly after "Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes".


Update May 28: the Bosnian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences has language with a good model for differentiating commercial and non-commercial use:

For commercial use no part of this publication 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.

For non-commercial use, with a proper citation, any part of this publication 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. from: http://www.bjbms.org/ojs/index.php/bjbms/about/submissions#copyrightNotice
Update May 28: Engg Publishers - the Journal of Computing / Academy Publisher's copyright transfer agreement is one example -  is a clear example of a fully gold OA publisher prohibiting author self-archiving. Following are the author / employer rights (employer in case of work-for-hire) after copyright transfer with respect to self-archiving:


The right to make copies of the Work for internal distribution within the institution which employes the author. from: http://www.jcomputers.us/JCP_Copyright.pdf 
The Electronic Journal of Geotechnical Engineering has nearly identical language in their Copyright Transfer Agreement:

The right to make and distribute copies of the work within the
   institution that employs the author. from: http://www.ejge.com/copyrite.txt

Similarly Physiological Research:
You can use freely your own article for the internal educational or research purposes of your own institution or company http://www.biomed.cas.cz/physiolres/Copyright_Form.pdf

Update May 27: the Creative Commons noncommercial element may be used for a number of reasons. Authors like myself or people sharing photos on flickr may prefer NC licenses simply because they want to share their work but do not want to grant blanket permission to others to make money off the work. However, publishers may choose to use NC to indicate that they wish to retain exclusive commercial rights. Dove Medical Press provides a clear-cut example of this. Following is language from the Dove commercial rights site:

The articles published on and distributed from the Dove Medical Press websiteat http://www.dovepress.com, or available at any journal indexing web sites or any other website that provide access to any DMP published articles or any part of an article (including, but not limited to the abstract, figures, tables) may not be distributed, make copies or reproduce, in any media or format,  all or any of the articles in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation without the prior written consent of Dove
Medical Press, and the payment to Dove Medical Press of an appropriate fee. For the avoidance of doubt, providing a hyperlink to a DMP article in a manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation shall be a breach of the license terms. 

Comment: this use of the noncommercial term is clearly intended solely to protect the financial interests of the publisher, not the rights of authors or research subjects or the protection of the OA status of the works which I would argue are other good reasons for considering noncommercial licenses. The inclusion of language about hyperlinking seems a better fit for IP protection / copyright maximalism than open access. It is ludicrous and dangerous to sharing (of knowledge, cultural, free expression of various kinds) to invoke copyright in linking. Imagine if we could not cite without clearing copyright? This example may help illustrate the attraction of the CC-BY license; CC-BY would address this kind of mis-use of the noncommercial element, however as I point out in the Creative Commons and Open Access series, this solves one set of problems but introduces other serious problems. 
 

Update May 22: the Elsevier website provides a good illustration of how author copyright can be in name only, with all but nominal rights transferred to the publisher. 

Update May 22: Brill has a suite of Open Content license-to-publish for different CC licenses that is worth a look. The author indemnity clause is a concern; I would recommend not signing. The NC licenses clarify that authors depositing in repositories are making their work available, but not for commercial use. This is a good move in my opinion; it protects repositories from pressures to sell their content.

Update May 21: mBIO has such good language for explaining what they mean in using a noncommercial license that the language is copied in a separate post

Update May 21: the draft policy I first noticed in the Journal of Orthopaedic Case Reports appears to be an OJS default policy.

Issue: CC-BY with "exclusive license to publish"
Computer Science Journals License & Copyright Policies - excerpts

For published papers Open Access Publications (OAP), following are the policies that are applicable:
  • author retain the copyrights of the work.
  • author has the right for proper attribution and credit for the published work.
  • author gives the right to reuse of their work defined by CC-BY.
  • author can self-archive his article provided that he inform CSC Journals including the complete details to which article is shared, submitted or uploaded to any website.

PUBLISHER RIGHTS

As an open access publisher, we need publishing rights in order to publish and widely disseminate and share your publish papers through websites, databases and for printing. Author gives certain rights to CSC Journals for their articles including:
  • An exclusive right to publish and distribute an article.


Advances in Electrical and Computer Engineering 
http://www.aece.ro/openaccess.php

Issues
  • copyright transfer
  • posting final PDF to repository explicitly forbidden
  • DOAJ indicates CC-BY-NC-ND while the journal site indicates All Rights Reserved 
This is far from optimal open access. I can understand why pushing for a CC-BY default would be tempting as a solution. But would a more liberal CC license solve these problems? This is less clear. If a journal requires author copyright transfer, there can be a license agreement between author and publisher that limits the rights of the author. If the publisher holds the copyright, the publisher can change the license or transfer the journal to another publisher that uses a different license.

DOAJ indicates that this journal is CC-BY-NC-ND, however I see no indication on the journal website that this license is used. It is possible that the journal changed policy at some point in time, in which case this information may have been correct when it was entered, and may be correct for some of the content in the journal, but not for articles published today. Indicating licensing at the journal level is not the simple solution that it might seem.

Excerpts from the Open Access Policy page:

As an author of a paper submitted to Advances in Electrical and Computer Engineering journal, you have to transfer the copyright of your paper prior to the evaluation process. The copyright transfer covers all rights to referee, translate, publish, digitize, archive, reproduce and distribute, including reprints, photographic reproduction, microform, or any other reproductions of similar nature. For details please see the Copyright Transfer Form.

By signing the Copyright Transfer you still retain substantial rights, such as self-archiving. Bellow are summarized some of the right the author(s) retain along with some things they are not allowed to do. 


 What you are expressly NOT ALLOWED to do:

- Do not post the full article PDF file downloaded from the AECE web-site to any other web-site(s). Instead, you may use a link to the article page using the permanent link by using the Digital Object Identifier (doi:) link http://dx.doi.org/AECE-paper-doi (every article has a DOI number assigned - see the one assigned to your paper);


Copyright statement from a recent article:
 Copyright ©2001-2015
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava, Romania
All rights reserved: Advances in Electrical and Computer Engineering is a registered trademark of the Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, photocopied, recorded or archived, without the written permission from the Editor. When authors submit their papers for publication, they agree that the copyright for their article be transferred to the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava, Romania, if and only if the articles are accepted for publication. The copyright covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the article, including reprints and translations.

Permission for other use: The copyright owner's consent does not extend to copying for general distribution, for promotion, for creating new works, or for resale. Specific written permission must be obtained from the Editor for such copying. Direct linking to files hosted on this website is strictly prohibited.

Disclaimer: Whilst every effort is made by the publishers and editorial board to see that no inaccurate or misleading data, opinions or statements appear in this journal, they wish to make it clear that all information and opinions formulated in the articles, as well as linguistic accuracy, are the sole responsibility of the author. 


The solution? The default open access policy statement that comes with OJS journals may be enough. The intent is clear. Uses consistent with the global exchange of knowledge are clearly in line with this policy. Commercial use and creation for derivatives for reasons other than the global exchange of knowledge are not clearly pre-approved, avoiding the problems of blanket downstream permission that come with CC licensing. 

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Electronic Journal of Biotechnology

Issues
  • copyright transfer
  • author re-use limited to unspecified academic purposes 
Excerpt from the journal's instructions to authors  http://www.ejbiotechnology.info/index.php/ejbiotechnology/about/submissions#authorGuidelines May 19, 2015

Copyright Notice

Upon acceptance of an article by the journal, authors will be asked to transfer the copyright to Electronic Journal of Biotechnology, which is committed to maintain the electronic access to the journal and to administer a policy of fair control and ensure the widest possible dissemination of the information. The author can use the article for academic purposes, stating clearly the following: "Published in Electronic Journal of Biotechnology at DOI:10.2225/volXX-issueX-fulltext-XX".
 International Journal of Agricultural Management & Development

Issue: copyright transfer. Text from publisher website May 21, 2015: http://www.ijamad.com/authorsguideliens.htm
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if and when the manuscript is accepted for publication, the authors agree to automatic transfer of the copyright to the publisher.

International Journal of Educational Research & Technology: copyright transfer  http://soeagra.com/ijert_author.html " COPYRIGHT POLICY
Each manuscript must be accompanied by a statement that it has been neither published nor submitted for publication, in whole or in part, either in a serial, professional journal or as a part in a book which is formally published and made available to the public. For the mutual benefit and protection of authors and publishers it is necessary that authors provide formal written consent to publisher and transfer of copyright form after acceptance of papers is necessary that authors provide formal written consent to publisher and transfer of copyright form after acceptance of papers
"

International Journal of Education Research - website says "free online access" and Author Guidelines include this disclaimer:

The IJER is protected under international copyrights. The IJER provide full data free of cost to all users. Important notice for copy right are –
·         No data from this website can be copied or used anywhere without pre-permission.
·         Neither IJER nor a member involves in copy and reuse of data from any other website.
·         All material in IJER undergoes peer review to ensure fair, objectivity, independency and educational need.
·         Neither the editor of IJER nor a member of this journal involved in the preparation of material contained in the other journal or website.
·         IJER may use the link of other journal or other website to operate by other parties.
·         The links will be provided purely for educational purpose.
      ·         IJER disclaims all liability with regard to your access of such linked web sites.
 International Journal of Educational Research and Development
  
Issue: copyright transfer with exclusive publisher rights 

From the Author Fees page: 
In case of publication of the article in the journal, I/We hereby assign copyright to the ‘International Journal Of Innovative Research & Development’ for its publication in any form/language including all media (print and electronic, or presently unknown), and exclusive right to use the matter for the life of the work (no time restriction on reuse of matter). ‘International Journal Of Innovative Research & Development’ may assign its rights under this Agreement.
Note that this is in contradiction with the spirit the default OJS statement on the journal's open access policy page which states: "This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge". This contradiction may reflect a default policy left in the software without review or a learning curve about open access.

More examples of copyright transfer (I won't copy the language every time unless there is something different):

License to publish - the Problems of Economy Journal has an interesting license to publish. The Licensor is the Author - here is what the author grants to the journal - it appears the only limitation for the author involves giving away exclusive rights to another publisher:

2.1. The Licensor grants the Licensee a non-exclusive license, which gives the right to use the Article of the Licensor within the contractual boundaries.
2.2. This Contract provides the rights to use the Article in the following ways:
– reproduction of the Article;
– inclusion of the Article into journals, anthologies, monographs, etc.;
– distribution of the Article;
– presenting the Article to the general public in such a manner that its representatives can have access to the Article from any place and at any time at their own discretion.
2.3. The Licensor has the right to continue to use the Article and provide a non-exclusive license for its use to other parties.


Interstat copyright statement:  InterStat does not copyright its contents. Thus an author is free to submit the article elsewhere. Of course, an article which has already appeared in a copyrighted publication may not be submitted for publication in InterStat. [Comment: the publisher is based in India, a signatory to the Berne Convention which includes automatic copyright. If the publisher does not claim any copyright, this remains with the author(s), assuming they are from Berne countries. This might not be clear to authors].

CC-BY with limitations on author use - Journal of Ayurveda and Holistic Medicine

The undersigned author(s) retain copyright and grant the journal right of first Publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal...All accepted works should not be published elsewhere without prior written permission from JAHM. [emphasis added] The author(s) hereby represents and warrants that they are sole author(s) of the work, that all authors have participated in and agree with the content and conclusions of the work, that the work is original, and does not infringe upon any copyright, propriety, or personal right of any third party, and that no part of it nor any work based on substantially similar data has been submitted to another publication.

CC-BY in DOAJ and on publisher website with full copyright transfer and no indication of CC-BY license on 2 recent articles - language from the Journal of Multidisciplinary Scientific Research online copyright form: 
COPYRIGHT TRANSFER: Copyright to the above work (including without limitation, the right to publish the work in whole, or in part, in any and all forms) is hereby transferred to RESEARCH, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PUBLISHERS.

Update May 21 - note that this appears to be an OJS default statement as the same language appears in
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Mathematical and Computational Forestry & Natural-Resource Sciences
http://mcfns.com/index.php/Journal/about/submissions#copyrightNotice
CC-BY with an interesting draft policy statement - but this does not explain to authors that the license grants others commercial and re-distribution rights from the Journal of Orthopaedic Case Reports - language:

Update October 4, 2015: the Journal of Orthopaedic Case Reports now uses a CC-BY-NC-SA license which seems to be a good fit for the rights-sharing approach they are looking for.  The editor has honoured me to write an editorial on this topic for the January 2016 issue, which I have accepted. The issues are complex - not just which CC license to use, but also the nature of the contractual relationship between journal and publisher - so this is an interesting and timely topic.

Proposed Policy for Journal of Orthopaedic Case Reports


Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

  3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Copyright transfer + CC-BY-NC-ND + referral to copyright clearance center for photocopies:  those who wish to get their photocopies are requested to obtain permission from copyright clearance centre - Journal of Toxicologic Pathology.

CC-BY-NC-SA with instructions to contact author  to request permission for noncommercial use (the point of the CC licenses is so it is not necessary to request permission): mBio  http://mbio.asm.org/site/misc/authors.xhtml
  • issue: failure to understand that CC license terms are meant to avoid the need to ask permission

All Rights Reserved with extra limitations: The Modern journal of Applied Linguistics (MJAL
All rights reserved. No part of this journal may be reproduced in any form, by Photostat, microfilm, xerography, or any other means without permission in writing from the copy right owner. from http://www.mjal.org/
 This post is part of the Creative Commons and Open Access critique series.