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Researchers Opt To Limit Uses of Open-access Publications
ananyo writes "How open do researchers want open-access papers to be? Apparently, not that open — when given a choice of licenses, most opt to limit the use of data and words in their open-access publications, according to figures released by the open-access journal Scientific Reports. Since July 2012 the journal has been offering researchers a choice of three types of license. The first, most liberal license, CC-BY, allows anyone, even commercial organizations, to re-use it. A more restrictive version, CC-BY-NC-SA, lets others remix, tweak and build on work if they give credit to the original author, but only for non-commercial (NC) purposes, and only if they license what they produce under the same terms (SA, or 'share-alike'). A third licence, CC-BY-NC-ND, is the most restrictive, allowing others to download and share work, but not to change it in any way (ND, 'no derivative works'), or use it commercially. The results from Scientific Reports shows that, for the 685 papers accepted by the journal, authors chose either of the more restrictive licences 95% of the time — and the most restrictive, CC-BY-NC-ND, 68% of the time."
Researchers don't generally care about their papers being open access or not. They use open access journals because they are easy to get published in (they are mostly 'author pays' publications with very low standards) or because their funder mandates it.
I can't speak from experience but a lot of academic institutions put clauses in their contracts defining how ownership of inventions and discoveries are split between institution and employee. I don't think that any of them would expressly prohibit an open licence, but I can imagine a lot of researchers or their legal departments would be wary of trying to test the issue when a simpler option exists.
It seems to me that some good discussion of the potential legal issues from qualified people could help reassure authors and their employees.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
PLOS ONE seems to get by requiring articles to be CC-BY so some researchers are clearly ok with that licence.
In, say, Linux, you have the ability to modify the source and create a completely new ability by manipulating the functions presented to you. We call this programming.
If you take an open research article and modify it, then republish it with attribution given to the original author, it turns what is (supposedly) reliable scientific information into a potential weapon against the author, with various elements citing it against the author in other publications.
Imagine what the strict use of CC-BY-SA would be if used by a modern fundamentalist anti-science group against climate change researchers, for instance.
Why is this surprising? Open access, which most scientists support in principle, is not the same as open source. It's about making sure that research outputs (particularly those that are government-funded) are made available for everyone to read, not just those with an expensive subscription. Access to that knowledge support innovation. It doesn't mean being able to reuse the original material however you like.
Where's the CC-BY-ND option? I would have thought most scientists would not want others to alter their work because it is not technical documentation or code, but an expression of their own thoughts.
"Researchers don't generally care about their papers being open access or not."
- quite a blanket statement. Quite a few researchers in my area are very enthusiastic about open access journals from a philosophical standpoint rather than "because they are easy to get published in" (plenty of poor quality closed journals fit into that category, they spam us regularly).
Evidence please. Or we're just slinging personal anecdotes here. Which wouldn't get us published in a decent peer-reviewed journal ;-)
The incentive structure for academic scientists is not encouraging all type of sharing. Primary data is usually hard and expensive to generate and may be the basis for future and ongoing projects as well (and future publications - i.e. career progress). By sharing data this value is potentially lost . At the moment there are very limited incentives to share data / create resources for academic scientists - this has to change, and then there would be more OA interests also for data sharing.
CC-BY-NC-ND is enough for the basic open access idea. Researchers can be sure that their papers can be easily and cheaply accessed by everyone interested. This license covers only the paper as a whole and ensures its (textual) integrety. The readers can still use its ideas (potential patents are independent of the paper and its license) and cite it according to the normal fair use and scientific writing rules.
Open access is ensuring that everyone can read your papers. All the other CC ones are about derivative work rights, which is orthogonal to open access.
In fact, its rather silly to even think of: Quoting papers is fair use, but modifying scientific papers? You don't want third parties modifying the papers: they can easily screw things up as the paper is only part of the process, there is also the data and analysis behind it.
So of the choices given, CC-BY-NC-ND is the only one that should be in that list.
Test your net with Netalyzr
As a scientist I want everyone to be able to read my work. But if I write an article I don't want to allow others to modify it. If they change it, put their name on it and publish it anywhere, then they are commiting plagiarism, which is one of the most serious crimes in the scientific world. If they change it and leave my name on it, then they are publishing something I did not approve in my name, which is probably even worse.
Your anecdote doesn't explain why there's a whole Open Access movement to begin with. Who do you think are leading this? If researchers didn't care, then "open access" wouldn't even exist as a term.
I suggest that the people you're hanging around are just behind the curve. Certainly the charge is lead by researchers that have 'embraced the internet'. Given that I recently saw someone writing a medical paper in MS Word using Comic Sans, I guess it's not your guys. This will change once they realize that their number (1) is positively correlated with open access; more easily available equals more read equals more citations equals higher impact.
Science researchers live and die by their publications. Their papers are their currency. To let someone completely modify it and not even attribute it back to them is near professional suicide, unless you're already so famous that you don't need additional papers. As a result, you're right, they don't care that much whether journals are open access or not. They really care about whether publishing their paper somewhere is going to help their career, or hurt it. The first license is at best not going to help, at worst going to hurt it. That leaves the other two, with the final one being the one that guarantees that your name will stay attached to it, and that it will stay as they wrote it.
Note that even the final license let's anyone view it, download it and pass it around. That's pretty damn good open access, and exactly what is needed. The rest is just what the scientists want to see happen to their paper.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
95% + 68% = 163%
Did I miss something?
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
There have been people arguing against the NC clause for CC licenses for some time now, and almost all of them are basically saying "We want to take the stuff that these people have given away under CC-NC, maybe repackage it, and sell it." In other words, "Why can't I profit from other people's hard work without even talking to them about my project and paying them if they demand it?"
If you want to repackage or resell something that's CC-NC, you can contact the person who wrote it, and get the rights to do your commercial project. That can be difficult if you're talking about, say, an image uploaded to a public digital art gallery, but it's not at all difficult when it's a journal article that says who wrote the article and what institutions they're affiliated with. That person may ask you to pay royalties or a flat fee, which is only fair, since you're trying to profit from their work.
And yes, this makes CC-NC a more restrictive license for commercial work than, say, the GPL (which explicitly allows selling copies if you want). Tough.
I am officially gone from
Most researchers like open-access, but they are more concerned about publishing in a widely-read journal with a long-standing reputation for rigorous peer-review, because that looks better on their CVs
Fortunately, in the area of biomedical research, virtually all publication is effectively ope-access, because most biomedical researchers receive at least some support from NIH, and NIH requires that all publications supported by NIH funds be available to the public within a year of publication
And I assume that the choice was one of the 3 licenses offered about 99.73% of the time.
"... authors chose either of the more restrictive licences 95% of the time — and the most restrictive, CC-BY-NC-ND, 68% of the time."
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
As a scientist, I publish my work in form of a paper. Others can use the results mentioned in the paper (for free). This is normal scientific practice. However, I do not want that some other person takes my paper, modifies it and republishes it somewhere else. BTW that is considered plagiarism, which is immoral in the scientific community. When it is about data, you can use them as input, but not modify them and say it is the same or "new version" of my data. However, you could derive your own data from it, mention where you got it and what you modified and why. For my code, it is released under Apache or Eclipse license. And yes you can do wan ever you want. However, I would like, if you would contribute and publish you additions.
I published a few paper (Quantum physic), and i do care that people read them. But I would not want somebody to take them and CHANGE them potentially reflecting badly unto me because the guy changing it make a blunder. *shrug* not a surprise other feel the same.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Both CC-BY-ND and CC-BY-NC-SA have never been clearly defined for research, where it's the ideas, not the specific document used to convey those ideas that matter.
So, for instance -- if I write a paper on using (MethodX) to solve (ProblemY1), and someone realizes that (MethodX) might also be able to solve (ProblemY2), are they allowed to do it, or using it in new ways a derivitive? What if they wrote a paper about their findings, is that a derivitive? How about if I realize that there's a larger (ProblemY), is that a derivitive? Or if I realized that I could improve on (MethodX), is that a derivitive? Or even if you just have another occurance of (ProblemY1), are you allowed to use this knowledge of (MethodX) to apply it to the problem, or is any application of the research considered a derivitive?
The other one that people suggest for papers is CC-BY-NC, thinking that it'd prevent someone from using the ideas in the paper from trying to create a business around the idea ... but does this also mean that you're not allowed to publish new research that builds in a CC-BY-NC paper in a for-profit journal? Or attempt to get grants to extend the work?
The CC licenses (other than CC0) just don't work for research articles. I'm not even sure if CC-BY really works. (it's one thing to cite a paper ... but does it chain? Do we have issues with publishers who limit number of items in a reference list?) How do you give attribution when it actually gets used? (Do you acknowledge the authors when you install a road using asphalt they developed, or during the grand opening, or every time someone drives on it?)
Yes, this all may seem pedantic, but the CC licenses were developed for a specific purpose, and it was *not* research. I was at a meeting a couple of years back (not sure if it was BRDI or DataCite, as they were back-to-back), where John Wilbanks (at the time with Science Commons) was recommending CC0 for research data, in part because of these problems.
(In the case of data, the discussion typically comes up as either 'Data Use' vs. 'Data Re-Use' or as 'Data Repurposing', or the greater concept of 'Data Policies')
Until we get these cleared up, CC-BY-ND and CC-BY-NC-SA should *NOT* be used for publishing research.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
You're completely missing the idea of copyright as applied to a paper. The work that is copyrighted is the paper itself, not the research described within. You can build your research on the results of others absolutely normally - and that's what Newton meant. Read, do research based on it, write a new paper. Fair use makes it even possible to cite the parts you want to discuss, if necessary. I can't really think of anything more you could ask for, anything "more free".
On the other hand, building your paper on someone else's paper by just modyfing the relevant parts is not in any way helpful for science - and that's the definition of derivative work here. In fact, if you do something like this, you're a lousy, lazy scientist - if you can fit your results into an existing paper like that, you probably haven't done anything new and worth reading. ND-free licenses are extremely useful for code, potentially useful in art, but worthless in science. There's no value added here.
I think the idea of labeling your research as "ND" is pretty anti-social. If you don't want other people to use your stuff, then fine, don't show it to anyone. Why would anyone submit a paper to an "Open Access" journal, and then label their paper as "No Derivatives."
Seriously? You consider only completely open or completely closed position as non-hypocritical? What you're saying is just pseudophilosophical mumbo-jumbo, based on a fundamentalist understanding of "information wants to be free". Is you believe that, peer reviewed papers should not exist - you should publish everything, whether or not competent peers think it's utter BS. Sorry, but this does not work for stuff as specialized as scientific papers.
Here's the plain English version of the "No Derivatives" clause of the CC-BY-NC-ND license:
No Derivatives: You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
Citations and quotes are covered under fair use, so that's still possible. The problem is that of the three parts of the ND clause, the "build upon" part is the only one that should apply to a scientific paper. Now this clause might be considered too restrictive for something like a photograph or work of fiction for some people, but the "may not alter or transform" parts should almost be automatic for evidence-based, peer-reviewed scientific paper.
I'd recommend that Creative Commons consider adding a slightly less restrictive version of "No Derivatives" and call it something like "No Modifications". It could go something like this:
No Modifications: You may not alter or transform this work except to enable efficient search and retrieval of the work from an automated storage system and for basic reformatting required to display a work in a different medium.
This would allow other researchers to "build upon" the research (what scientific research really is). It would make it clear that storing the paper in a database is fine as long as when the paper is actually displayed, it isn't changed except for possibly formatting (think margins and fonts). The paper could be republished (again with formatting changes) as long as the BY clause (and NC clause, if present) is followed.
This seems to be a good compromise between SA and ND. The NM clause also be used for other types of works. For example, a photo used in a calendar under SA could be cropped and photo-manipulated. Under NM it could be included in the calendar (built upon), but only transformations needed for publication would be allowed such as resizing and changing the resolution. Under ND it couldn't be used in the calendar at all.
I also might suggest a couple other clauses. First: CA - Commercial Available. This would indicate that while the work is released under "No Commercial Use", the author is open to commercial use on a case by case basis. Second: NP - Non Profit. This would indicate that the work could be used in something that would be sold (like the calendar) as long as some portion of the proceeds (say 70%) went to a non-profit organization officially recognized by the appropriate government agency in the organization's legal jurisdiction.
So the levels would be:
Money:
- Any Use
- Non Profit (Optional Commercial Available)
- No Commercial Use (Optional Commercial Available)
Changes:
- Any Change
- No Modifications (can be reformatted and built upon)
- No Derivatives (cannot be reformatted or built upon)
I void warranties.
Maybe ND doesn't actually prevent any scientists from building on top of one's research, but I think the idea of labeling your research as "ND" is pretty anti-social. If you don't want other people to use your stuff, then fine, don't show it to anyone.
You misunderstand.
You WANT people to use your stuff. You WANT them to build on it. And then you want them to write their own TEXT and publish that.
What you don't want is for somebody who does not build on your work to take your paper, jumble it around until it makes no sense and is completely wrong, and then claim that YOU wrote that mess.
All science is derivative. CC-BY-ND is already a huge improvement over the old situation where the copyright is owned by the publisher and the contents behind a paywall.
Because it's not clear what is and what is not commercial.
So? What's that got to do with anything? Pay for the right to use it, and you can then do anything you want to find out if it is. Hell, you could use the work to do your own research for free, then if you find out it has commercial applications get a licence.
No sympathy for you.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I NEED my work to be attributed to me, for prestige and ego, but most importantly because my paycheck and ability to put food in my children's plate depends on it.
I certainly do not want somebody to change the paper I carefully crafted to be scientifically accurate, adding BS to it, making it a pile of crap, and then attribute this to ME. That would be detrimental to my career and reputation.
If you want to write BS, make it in your own paper where you will be responsible for it, not in mine. Feel free to cite my work when extending it (even if your interpretation of the work is wrong, interested people can refer to the ORIGINAL material, w/o the BS, to judge), but don't modify it.
The summary and title confuse two very different things: open access, which means anyone anywhere can read your paper and learn from it, and open source, which means people can take your words, figures, etc. and reuse them in their own papers and other works, or add their own words into the middle of your paper. Most scientists I know strongly favor open access. That does not mean they want their papers treated as open source. They usually view each paper as a carefully crafted finished product. Other papers will build on it and the science will move on, but the paper remains as a permanent statement of what they had to say on a particular subject at a particular point in time. It's not written to be a living document that keeps evolving and getting modified the way open source software does.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Many world-class conferences (ICPR, for example) are charging up to USD 1000 for registration
This depends on your field. You would not get many particle physicists at a conference with a $1,000 registration fee!
As I said its about impact factor. If and when open access journals get decent impact factors, researchers will be more inclined to use them.
It is not just about impact factor. I would not want to release a paper without a ND licence because a scientific paper is not the same as a book or manual. It is essentially scientific "speech" where you communicate your ideas to others. They are then free to take that idea and run with it but I do not want some random stranger downloading the paper, editing it to change those ideas and conclusions, and then resubmitting it with my name associated with it. If they want to write their own paper then great - use the data, argue that my conclusions are wrong etc. but you don't get to edit my paper even if you willingly acknowledge I wrote it you have to write your own so it is clear whose opinion is being expressed.
This is particularly true in more controversial fields - imagine what would happen in climate change or evolutionary fields if anyone can download, edit and then resubmit papers. You could completely alter the meaning of the paper and resubmit it with credit given to the original authors who, by implication, will appear to be supporting whatever you wrote.
You misunderstand.
You WANT people to use your stuff. You WANT them to build on it. And then you want them to write their own TEXT and publish that.
Why shouldn't a peer of yours re-use some of your paper, if some of it (maybe some words...maybe some paragraphs) support their theses as well? With correct attribution, can't you share in his work/glory, just as derivative patents do?
I can understand that if there's a specific assignment for a class or some specific degree program in which the purpose of the exercise is for people to compose their own work from scratch then re-using excerpts or pieces from other's works might be contrary to those specific goals. But just because we've followed certain (non-)collaborative paths in science for centuries doesn't mean that we need to continue in that fashion.
What you don't want is for somebody who does not build on your work to take your paper, jumble it around until it makes no sense and is completely wrong, and then claim that YOU wrote that mess.
I understand the argument, but can someone please provide concrete examples of what is okay and what is nokay? What does it mean for someone to "build on your work" ? How much of your paper, data, or ideas may they quote?
I don't understand how someone can take someone else's work and turn it into something that "makes no sense" and "is completely wrong", unless they fundamentally misattribute or misquote the person. Can someone please provide an example of a paper that X wrote that was then perverted by Y until it was "completely wrong" ?
If ND is so important for content creators, why don't we see random programmers out there taking the Linux kernel, "jumbling it around until it makes no sense," and then publishing a derivative work in some fashion that defames/harms Linus and the rest of the kernel devs?
And just think about public domain works! What if someone were to take a paper written by my grandfather pre-1923 and twist its words into something "completely wrong" -- what recourse would his heirs have from that?
All science is derivative. CC-BY-ND is already a huge improvement over the old situation where the copyright is owned by the publisher and the contents behind a paywall.
Sure, CC-BY-ND might be an improvement over the draconian control exercised by the publishers in the past. But so would nearly any license change. Your statement doesn't say anything about whether CC-BY-ND is any better or worse than CC-BY-SA.
coding is life
You're completely missing the idea of copyright as applied to a paper.
Please do enlighten us!
The work that is copyrighted is the paper itself, not the research described within. You can build your research on the results of others absolutely normally - and that's what Newton meant. Read, do research based on it, write a new paper.
Sure, writing new papers is one possibliity. But it's not the only way to collaborate.
Fair use makes it even possible to cite the parts you want to discuss, if necessary. I can't really think of anything more you could ask for, anything "more free".
Fair use is a defense, not a right. It's not perfect, and it can be messy to defend in court (or so the lawyers tell me). Why wouldn't some scientists want to make their research and their ideas *even more* accessible to those who wish to remix them and/or use short/long excerpts?
On the other hand, building your paper on someone else's paper by just modyfing the relevant parts is not in any way helpful for science - and that's the definition of derivative work here.
What are the "relevant parts"? And are you certain that no useful science can come from borrowing data/charts/text from an existing paper beyond what Fair use would allow?
Example: I write a 100 page paper about monkey butts. Let's say it's about hair color and distribution. I include a lot of really useful pictures of monkey butts and graphs of the statistics thereof.
Someone else wants to write a new paper about monkey butts and realizes that they could use all of my existing charts and pictures as their data and come to some new and very interesting conclusions. Their paper is about cancerous growths, and it's not a critique of my paper, so they can't just suck up my data, pictures, and prepared charts and claim Fair use.
If my paper were under CC-BY-ND, they would probably be SOL. Let's say that I had since died (bad monkey stew), so they couldn't ask me for permission.
If, however, my paper were under CC-BY-SA, then they would be able to re-use all of my lovely scientific shit.
In fact, if you do something like this, you're a lousy, lazy scientist - if you can fit your results into an existing paper like that, you probably haven't done anything new and worth reading.
Or maybe the original scientist missed something? Or maybe there's a new, novel way to use his reasearch and copyrighted materials? (see above)
ND-free licenses are extremely useful for code, potentially useful in art, but worthless in science. There's no value added here.
When someone talks about "value-added" in terms of science, it raises a red flag for me. Why does science have to be about "adding value"? Sure, there are a lot of people and a lot of companies that do a lot of hard science, and bully for them. But I don't have to argue that all of them should eschew the ND clause, I just have to show that some scientists have valid reasons for avoiding it.
Seriously? You consider only completely open or completely closed position as non-hypocritical? What you're saying is just pseudophilosophical mumbo-jumbo, based on a fundamentalist understanding of "information wants to be free".
Any half-open or half-closed position seems like a very hard position to argue. Bright lines, as any lawyer will tell you, are easy: Everything falls neatly to one side or the other. As I stated above in my answer, perhaps the "No Derivatives" clause actually legally accomplishes something quite different from its generic meaning in everyday English, and so some classes of "derivative works" of a paper marked ND are actually allowed. My point is that it is sad that the term is named "No Derivatives" when a scientist seems interested (if not intent) upon sharing their work with the world at large via an "Open Acces
coding is life
Just wanted to say my compliments on you tagline... it actually made me feel a bit nauseous, and that's a lot from a tagline!
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
I smell a troll (hint - first sentence), but I'll bite. At least partially.
First of all - thank you for explaining to me what peer review is. Having been on both sides of it and working every day with other scientists, some a lot better than me, I must have completely misunderstood. What I meant was: your paper will only be shown to a few selected reviewers and if they say no, it won't make it into the journal. That's quite incompatible with strict (or rather "fanatic") "information wants to be free" approach.
Why does science have to be about adding value? Because that's the whole point. You add nothing - you shouldn't publish. Or are you really arguing for publishing papers on new results from a well known experiment just to say "nothing new or unexpected was seen"? Ah, I get it. You only see "value" as something monetary. Well, sorry about that, too much time spent with corpo-drones, I guess. I meant scientific value - discoveries, nontrivial new data, hypotheses, etc.
What if the original scientist missed something? Well, you cite him and write a short paper explaining what you found. Why republish the graphs, pictures, original text?
If you think that half-open or half-closed positions are hard to argue - why do you discuss CC licenses? They are half-open. Only public domain is fully open. Anything else imposes some restrictions.
If your monkey guy already died, in any sane copyright system his work would be fair game very, very soon. Unfortunately most copyright systems are now insane. Anyway - in that case just cite, don't republish. You have the right to do that.
Is there anything special about having a doctorate? Well, being a PhD and knowing a lot of people with different degrees, I can tell you - absolutely nothing. It is sometimes useful with people who trust titles, but the reality is: not everyone can get one, but at the same time not everyone who can, does (and some who really shouldn't somehow do). A doctorate is a weak hint about how good someone is, at most.
What I meant about "specialized stuff" is that few people are competent to judge a given paper. It is very hard to build a more open trust-based system. I'm competent in some fields, so I might be trusted, but who will stop me from rating a paper on quantum physics? It's much easier with code or art.
The reason for ND is exactly what you said - clear divisions are easiest. Plagiarism is ethically very bad in science. A paper getting most of it's quality from the original is a clear case, but one that clearly adds something very important may not be, even if they both are equally similar to the original. Amount of text/graphs/whatever is not enough to judge that. So the dominant choice is to disallow any reuse beyond fair use unless you get permission first. Simple and works well. Sometimes too limiting? True. Oh, well. The other clear option is worse - allow any reuse, and you'll get too many very weak papers. Why is it worse? MONEY. Criteria for scientists are clear - number of publications and general quality of the journals. It's a flawed system, but that's real life - the people doing the evaluation cannot review every paper separately. If full reuse is ok, you can try to flood with small changes to good papers, something will squeeze through - and the system breaks.
Anyway, feel free to not use ND in your papers, I don't mind. As you can see, most scientists think otherwise. Given that most of those I know think that way and at the same time willingly make their own code open source, I'm willing to assume that there really is a difference. Unless most(*) of the scientists are just stupid or misguided. Go ahead, preach.
(*) see percentages in the summary
Plagarism exists in closed journals as well. It didn't start with the open access journals movement. You as an author can declare how you'd like your work to be protected (look up "creative commons licences" if this is new to you). Whatever licence you issue under, including the closed journal copyright agreements that are very restrictive, people may rip off your work.
Visible to all is what many people would like to achieve! Certainly, some of us don't like the idea that the tax payers pay for our work and then have to pay again to view the results of our work. They paid for it so they should be able to see what we write up...