Non-commercial license
David Bickel
Thursday, 27 November 2008 12:18 UTC
The Attribution License might conflict with the interests of some publishers since it allows competitors to distribute the preprints for profit.
Why not allow researchers to select the Attribution Non-Commercial license? The arXiv already gives multiple license choices.
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Replies
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Hi David,
Science Commons, one of our partners, strongly recommended the use of CC-BY licenses for our purposes. They’ve suggested that the ‘share-alike’ and ‘non-commercial’ clauses are difficult to interpret (especially for content other than images and music) and that the ambiguity in the licenses can leave users unsure as to what they can and cannot do with it. It is also unclear to me what the implications of a CC-BY-NC license would be when the content is posted on a site run by a commercial entity such as NPG (although I suspect Flickr would encounter the same problem).
Creative Commons recently announced that they are initiating a study to determine how various communities interpret the “non-commercial” clause. Their concern is that “the NC term may further or impede [content creators’] intentions with respect to the works they choose to share”. While I understand the appeal of the CY-BY-NC license (no one wants to feel as if their work is being taken advantage of for monetary gain by others), I have also found myself restricted by it. I recently gave a presentation at a workshop funded by the NSF on the future of scientific communication. The goal of the workshop was to discuss ways of using innovative technology to increase transparency of research and improve the opportunities for examination, re-use, and enhancement of new results. In a brief presentation, I was planning on citing data from the Sherpa/RoMEO project on journal policies regarding preprints. Unfortunately, their site states that “the information provided by the SHERPA RoMEO service is not for commercial re-use”. As an employee of a commercial publisher, it appears that I cannot use data from their project in order to encourage more researchers to make their work openly available. This, to me, seems counter to the goals of their project.
John Wilbanks, VP of Science Commons, has also stated that while commercial profit from freely available content is a widespread concern, he hasn’t seen a lot of companies actually selling content that was freely contributed by the community. Part of this may be due to the fact that is is difficult to sell content that everyone knows is free (e.g. it would be very difficult to sell subscriptions to a copy of Wikipedia).
In regard to possible conflicts with the interests of some publishers, we’ve attempted to argue that the widespread distribution of preprints is actually beneficial for publishers. An internal study here suggested that for articles published in Nature Physics, those that had a preprint version available on ArXiv.org received more downloads of the published version (and more citations to the published version). A number of other studies have also found that increased citations to published articles occurs with other journals where the preprints of published articles are available (and increased citations would obviously correlate with an increased impact factor). There are many possible explanations for this phenomenon, but it suggests that preprints servers may be complementary to (and not conflicting with) the interests of publishers. On the other hand, there do not appear to be any studies that show journals losing revenue (e.g. subscriptions) due to widely available preprints of their content. While it seems intuitive that preprints could cut into journal revenue, I haven’t seen any evidence that this is the case.
I’d love to hear more about the experiences of others with CC-BY-NC (or CC-BY) licenses for scientific research. Also, if anyone knows of any data showing that preprints negatively affect journal revenue, please forward them—I’m sure there are people here who would love to know before NPG invests any more in Nature Precedings! ;)
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Hilary’s already summed up much of what I say on this topic, and what Science Commons / Creative Commons say.
Non-commercial and share-alike language is good for some kinds of content – it can be great for musicians in particular who want to avoid their tunes being sucked into commercials, or photographers who don’t want to see their snaps on bus stops – but it isn’t so good for science. There are all sorts of questions as to when you’ve made a commercial use.
Let’s say I blog a paper under a NC license. On NN. I’m not a commercial entity. NPG is. Have I violated the license?
Or let’s say I blog on my personal blog. I use Google Ads to defray the cost of running my own server, so I make $75 a month. Have I violated the license?
Let’s say I want to translate all papers on HIV into Portuguese for distribution in clinics in Brazil. I pay for high quality translations by selling bound copies to universities in Sao Paulo, though I give away the papers online and in the clinics. Have I violated the license?
It goes on. Let’s say I make a derivative work by reformatting all the papers into XML and making a massive text mining effort to integrate the literature and the data. This is something that would be tremendously valuable to search engines, so I expose it to the Neurocommons project. Hopefully I haven’t taken any corporate money so far, so I’m ok – but can the Neurocommons allow Hilary to run a search? Every search output is a derivative data product, and she works in a company.
NC simply breaks far too many expected uses in science to qualify as true OA. That’s why the declarations say there isn’t a role for copyright other than to protect the rights of the author to be cited and attributed, and to protect the integrity of the article. We need business models that make publishing viable without copyright controls, including those that emanate from open licensing.
Your Mileage May Vary, and I don’t speak for my employer here.
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Thank you for your informative replies. Since I do not yet know where my bioinformatics paper will be published, I decided to play it safe and upload it to the arXiv under its minimal non-exclusive distribution alternative to the Attribution License. Once it is accepted for publication, the publisher will be able to allow more open distribution according to its own policies.
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David – Did the publisher explicitly state that you had to use a CC-BY-NC license for your preprint? Or were there other restrictions on preprint distribution that made you choose a CC-BY-NC license?
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Hilary, the publisher of the journal did not demand a non-commercial license. However, in case the manuscript is not accepted for publication in that journal, I wanted to keep my options open for submitting the manuscript to another journal if necessary. My thinking was that a more permissive, irrevocable license might limit those options more than would a less permissive license. I can always move from a less permissive license to a more permissive license, but not vice versa.
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