Yes - I agree with Paul. There's very little lost relative to the public domain
by going with the CCby license - it's what we chose long ago to use at PLoS.
But it's worth pointing out that the currency of non-commercial intellectual
work is citation, which is very different from the attribution protected by the
CCby license. Citation is an academic tradition, and the expectation that one
cites works they use applies to any published work, no matter the terms under
which it was distributed. For example, all works of US government employees have
been in the public domain for many decades. But - by tradition if not by law -
one still has to cite them when they are used.
The CCby license deals with something very different, requiring that, when the
work is reproduced, the original citation must be maintained in the copy. Since
normal academic referencing does not usually involve replication of the work,
this term is moot.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not arguing against the use of the CCby license - this
is something I strongly advocate. But this is because I see the value in
maintaining attribution in a future world where papers are widely replicated,
repackaged, etc... - not because it has any real impact on the current academic
citation system.
On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 4:44 PM, Uhlir, Paul <PUhlir_at_nas.edu> wrote:
I was referring to the first license below, Les. It has very few
restrictions. One could use the CC0 license, which dedicates the
work to the public domain, but almost all scientists want
attribution, since that is the currency of non-commercial
intellectual work. This is why I would reject the pure public domain
status of research publications that are the result of government
funded research, as suggested by Michael Eisen. There are other
reasons to treat the pure public domain option with scepticism, but
that is the main one in my view.
Paul
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Leslie Carr
Sent: Sun 2/21/2010 4:52 PM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: Captured product vs. service
On 21 Feb 2010, at 20:56, Uhlir, Paul wrote:
> In response to your last question, yes, if the article is made available
under an "Attribution Only" (ATT 3.0) Creative Commons license. This is
the recommended license for open access journals and is already broadly in
use. The advantage of this license is that it also allows various types of
automated knowledge discovery.
>
CC licenses are not without restrictions!
By "Attribution Only" do you mean
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ ?
---
Les Carr
--
Michael Eisen, Ph.D.
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Associate Professor, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
University of California, Berkeley
Received on Mon Feb 22 2010 - 08:02:16 GMT