ANALYSIS
PUBLISHERS MOVE TOWARDS CC-BY LICENCE FOR OPEN-ACCESS ARTICLES
Each year, Open Access Week signals a wealth of access-related announcements from companies and organisations involved in scholarly publishing. This year many of the announcements focused on licensing conditions, writes Siân Harris
behind a paywall, which might seem to contradict some of the aims of open access. And there may be some uses that researchers are uncomfortable with. For example, medical researchers might be unhappy with parts of their papers being used to promote a particular drug. ‘We have come across a number of organisations whose governance restricts commercial reuse which may make it difficult for them to use a mandated CC-BY licence’ noted Nicola Gulley, editorial director of IOP Publishing. IOP’s OA articles were originally published
A
t first glance, open access (OA) can seem like a single, unifying concept. However, the reality is different. Even within the gold subset of OA (where publication
fees are paid by authors or others) there are many differences,
in particular what
users can do with content, which has varied between publications and publishers. However, the past month or so has seen several moves by publishers towards the CC- BY licence. These include the IET, Taylor & Francis, IOP Publishing, Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Wiley.
The CC-BY licence condition, defined by Creative Commons, allows modification and reuse of content, including commercially, provided that the original author is properly attributed.
A big driver for CC-BY was the position taken by the UK’s Research Councils UK (RCUK) and Wellcome Trust earlier this year. These funders, in agreement with the UK government’s strong OA endorsement in the Finch report, will require all publications from the research that they fund to be
8 Research Information DEC 2012/JAN 2013
made openly-accessible under this licence condition from April 2013.
Announcements of shifts to CC-BY have been welcomed on Twitter and in blog posts. In particular, some researchers are excited about the possibilities of mining scholarly content, without lengthy negotiations to gain permission. Some in the industry argue that non- commercial licences already allow data mining,
saying that the licence refers
simply to the published text and not to the underlying research data. However, this distinction breaks down in situations where the ‘data’ is the article text itself and the results contained within it.
Commercial opportunities There are also opportunities with CC-BY to use content commercially such as in developing new products or in industrial- academic partnerships. However, there are concerns with the implications of the licence. Because CC- BY allows for commercial reuse of content it could theoretically be published again,
under the CC-BY-SA-NC licence, where NC denotes ‘non commercial’. The SA means ‘share alike’, which allows reuse but requires that reuse is under the same licence terms. ‘We originally thought that SA would be good because it guaranteed OA,’ said Gulley. ‘We changed because after discussions with various organisations and other societies around the world we reached the conclusion that SA may not necessarily be enforceable and was proving to be a barrier for some users; for example, if they were re-using the content for an article in a non OA publication.’ Despite the change of licence conditions, Gulley still has reservations about the CC- BY licence. ‘Authors are not always clear what publishing under this licence really means,’ she explained.
Her reservations are shared by Victoria Gardner, open access publisher at Taylor & Francis / Routledge Journals: ‘We had, and still do have, some concerns around CC-BY, especially on the part of authors in social sciences and humanities, where ideas, rather than data, are their currency of communication. We believe that many authors will not be comfortable with the loss of freedom or of retained rights over their work.’
And there could be further challenges: ‘We also anticipate issues for those authors who wish to use third-party material within their papers. It will make permission clearance
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