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

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

[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.