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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."
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.
"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 ;-)
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.
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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.
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.
Not true at all. Most researchers (I would say it's a large majority) prefer open-access because of the better exposure of their work, and because of an innate desire to share their science with everybody. There are scientists with views differing from this, but they are, as far as I could see (and I, as a researcher that travels a lot to conferences and does research abroad often, have met a huge number of my colleagues) a small minority.
Not always true in my experience. One's enthusiasm for open access scientific publishing changes radically depending on whether you are publishing a paper or trying to access a paper. If you are publishing a paper then you want to have it in the most prestigious vehicle you can get into. It looks better on the CV come tenure or job interview time. For chemistry, say, you want to publish in JACS or JOC. But if I am reading the literature then I curse the bastards who published in JACS and JOC because I might not have free access to those journals.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine