Creative Commons -- Now With More Science

The Importance of writes "Yesterday, Creative Commons announced the launch of 'the Science Commons exploratory phase.' This may eventually become a sister organization of Creative Commons that 'will delve into both legal areas (patents, data) and subject matter (biomedicine) outside the scope of [the] current organization.' In related news, the open access science publisher, BioMed Central, has adopted CC's 'attribution license' for their over 100 peer-reviewed journals."

Comments

Obligatory Homestar Reference

[Romothecus]

strong sad + caffeine = SCIENCE

Science doesn't need this so much

[booch]

Hmm. Not sure why nobody is commenting on this one.

Science has a rich history of "standing on the shoulders of giants". (Mathematics probably has the strongest history of that.) I don't think there's a huge need for a sea change in Science; at least it's not as severe a problem as in the software and creative industries. I suppose there's some need to stem the patent problems and such.

But I don't think it needs an organization as strong as the Creative Commons or Free Software Foundation. As a "lesser evil" I think it may be harmful taking away our attention from the more important goals we need to accomplish.

Then again, I could be (and hope I am) wrong. Perhaps the various organizations will strengthen each other by bringing the problems to the attention of a wider audience.

Re:Science doesn't need this so much

[bcrowell]

I don't think there's a huge need for a sea change in Science; at least it's not as severe a problem as in the software and creative industries.
The issue is the outrageous cost of scientific journals, which has resulted from the increasing consolidation of the industry. Basically Elsevier (which was Galileo's publisher back when I was a young lad) has been eating up smaller presses, and jacking up their prices.

Price is a big issue. It locks poor countries out of the research world, and even in rich countries, universities are having to cut way back on their journal subscriptions.

The people who publish cookbooks and self-help manuals at least have an excuse for their prices: they have to provide extensive editorial services. Science journals, OTOH, get their editorial work done for them for free, by referees and (typically) unpaid associate editors. In my field (physics), authors normally supply their papers as LaTeX source, so the journal doesn't even have to worry about typesetting.

Re:Science doesn't need this so much

[Salis]

I'm not an editor at a peer-reviewed journal, but here's my two cents:

The whole process of selecting and managing the reviewers, sending out the pre-prints, editing them (because there's always mistakes), and making sure the text and graphics are set well does, in fact, cost money. The publisher makes a profit, of course, but I don't think it's as much as you would expect, given their prices. They're just not very efficient (and why be efficient if you're the major publisher and have a near-monopoly)?

So Elsevier just needs actual competition, but the barrier to entry in the science publication business is extremely high:

Besides actually publishing the journals (which any media company could probably do), you have to make extensive contacts with scientists in the respective field (so they can review papers) and convince those scientists that your journal is good enough to publish in.

The journals exist in a heirarchy of prestige. No one wants to publish in ...'Bioinformatics' when they can publish in 'Biophysical journal' or 'Journal of Chemical Physics'. 'Chaos' was originally the bottom of the heap, but they've been steadily rising in notoriety.

So the journal is supported by the people who publish in it...not the company who owns it.

Time to update the GPL

[aminorex]

The GPL needs to be updated to make it
compatible with attribution restrictions.
The old BSD license debate should be informed
by the newly available facts. A detailed
argument would be vast and misplaced, since
only RMS has actual decision influence over
the GPL, but promoting community reflection
of the inconsistencies in his principled
stance is not misplaced.

Re:Time to update the GPL

[bcrowell]

GPL and BSD are software licenses. They were never intended to be licenses for books and articles. There was a first generation of licenses for this kind of thing, the OPL and GFDL, and the CC licenses represnt a second iteration on those.

The GPL needs to be updated to make it compatible with attribution restrictions.
The GPL intentionally doesn't allow this, because it became a huge problem for BSD-style licenses. The lack of attribution requirements in the GPL is a feature, not a bug.

Re:Time to update the GPL

[OECD]

The GPL needs to be updated to make it compatible with attribution restrictions.

So, write your own license. Others have.

Re:Time to update the GPL

[aminorex]

> GPL and BSD are software licenses. They were never intended to be licenses for books and articles.

One motivation for using the GPL is the identification of speech and code. (I admit
that it is not RMS' motivation, which is more subtle, obscure, and sophisticated.) Thus,
I object to your use of the word "never": Many users do in fact intend it thus.

Feature or bug depends on your worldview;)

Attribution under the GPL

[tepples]

The GPL needs to be updated to make it compatible with attribution restrictions.

The GNU General Public License is perfectly compatible with attribution requirements. Look at any GPL'd source code, and you'll see a copyright notice, which contains an attribution (for example "Copyright 2004 Damian Yerrick"). The GPL requires those who modify a GPL'd work to preserve existing copyright notices.