RSS feedsCopyright has become a battleground. On one side are those who want tighter restrictions to protect the rights and revenues of creators and publishers. On the other are those who say that technology such as digital rights management (DRM) is eroding those rights, locking down access to content and obstructing scientific and artistic development.
The much disputed copyright laws have been joined by a number of new copyright licences, including Creative Commons (CC), Creative Archives and Copyleft. The Creative Commons licences are widely used globally, mostly by authors seeking to define the rights attached to their works. Microsoft has thrown its weight behind CC, and will it incorporate into Vista , its latest version of Windows.
CC licences are aimed at authors, but mainstream publishers are also using them to support new sales models. Blogs-to-books publisher The Friday Project has made Blood, Sweat and Tea, the diary of a London ambulance man, available online free under a CC licence. And in the US, Yale University Press has made The Wealth of Networks available for free download under a CC licence.
The Creative Commons organisation has also set up a Science Commons arm to promote the use of licences in open access to STM research. Rosemary Bechler, author of Unbounded Freedom, argues for Commons-based thinking.
“Great science and medicine is teamwork, disputation and the resulting creativity,” she says, “and progress in the world needs sharing and a much wider understanding among a more literate public. Yet in recent years, disturbing trends point to an increase in secrecy: business models that are predicated on restricting access to information and interlocking licensing agreements that require the added cost of legal advice as to whether they permit certain research.
“These trends, combined with the expansion of intellectual property protection law and the development of technologies that can literally lock down information, encroach on the ability of researchers to share knowledge, validate published results, and enjoy the freedom to work on something as fundamental as the human genome.”
With open arms
The open access (OA) community has welcomed CC licences. Blogger Peter Suber, author of Open Access News says: “Creative Commons licences are terribly useful. They are very easy to implement. They come in a good variety of flavours, including several that closely match the best public definitions of open access.
“Each one has three versions: human-readable, lawyer-readable and machine-readable. The machine-readable versions make it possible for search engines to filter results by licensing terms, helping users find resources that are both relevant and free to read and use. Google, Yahoo and the CC search engine already incorporate this option.”
OA journals can use CC licences instead of a copyright transfer deal. The OA journal receives an article from the author under a CC licence, and then publishes it under a CC licence. And non-OA journal authors can retain the rights to put a copy of the article online under a CC licence.
Traditional publishers have approached CC with caution. “The fear among publishers is that creators are giving away rights that can’t be clawed back,” explains Ben White, copyright and compliance manager at the British Library.
CC licences have not been widely adopted in traditional academic publishing because they entail open access, but they have been embraced in OA publishing. PloS, BMC and Biomed use CC, as do Springer and OUP for their hybrid OA journals.
“Most hybrid publishers don’t let authors who select their OA or OA-like option retain copyright or use OA-friendly licences,” says Suber. “But I think that’s a mistake: it makes the option less valuable to authors, and will keep author uptake low.
“Neither Springer nor OUP originally offered CC licences for their hybrid journals, but both changed their minds. That’s a good sign and I expect that some of the other hybrid journal publishers will also come around.”
Elsevier , though, sees little benefit in CC. Mark Seeley, Elsevier senior vice-president and general counsel, says: “The most important thing for STM authors is scholarly use of their own materials. The principles for this could be set out in a Creative Commons licence, but frankly what authors are looking for is generally well covered. What a publisher wants is consistency in approach to things like distribution, permission-granting issues and enforcement in plagiarism.
“BioMed advocates Creative Commons, but the author-pays model may be less concerned with the consistency and uniformity of rights. Publishers are concerned about rights administration and a lot of authors prefer the backing of publishers.”
Seeley is chair of the copyright committee of the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers. Its draft paper, Appropriate Balance for Academic Publishing and Academic Use, states: “The management of the scholarly publishing system is best done by publishers as professionals, and it is important to remember that publishers are in the business of making content available to the widest possible audience, provided they can do so in financially viable fashion. Exclusive rights are critical to administering the scientific record and ensuring viable business models for journals.”
Matt Cockerill, publisher at BioMed Central, which makes all its content available under CC licences, points to the practical benefits.
“BioMed articles supplied under a Creative Commons licence are free to be redistributed in NCBI’s standard full-text XML form by the NCBI [National Centre for Biotechnology Information]. Other articles, while they may be free on the publisher’s websites and even on PubMed Central, are not available for reuse and mining in this way.
“Because CC licences were designed from the start to encourage digital reuse, they are designed for machine readability. Web spiders can automatically recognise all articles published by BioMed Central as being open access and redistributable, thanks to the Creative Commons metadata embedded in every page.”
Google and Yahoo have also recently enhanced their Advanced Search pages to allow search results to be filtered to include only CC licensed content.
Jan Velterop, director of open access at Springer, says Springer’s decision to use CC licences in its OA content was a pragmatic one. “The CC licence suffers, in my opinion, a bit from the overkill that the American litigious culture seems to enjoy, but it does the job, has become a standard of sorts, and there’s no need to reinvent a wheel that rolls.”
John Wilbanks, executive director of Science Commons, believes open access is the key to CC acceptance. “CC licences are simply a free, standard way to go OA. We have had a lot of conversations with traditional publishers, and the questions are far more skewed towards ‘Should we go open access?’ than ‘Should we use Creative Commons?’. This applies across all the publishing models, though the newer models have a lot less inertia to overcome in making that choice to go open access.”
Common science
But Science Commons is intended to go beyond being just a mechanism for OA licensing, and to cover the entire research cycle.
Wilbanks says: “OA starts with the peer-reviewed articles and literature – when there is no access to the scientific canon, the research cycle can’t get started. But we are also looking into places where research is slowed by issues involving real materials such as DNA plasmids and other biological materials and how the semantic web can help organise the scholarly canon into a more useful format.
“All of these issues – OA, biological materials transfer, and semantic web – are part of the overall ecosystem of how knowledge and tools and data move between scientists. We see a world where that system is in many places hamstrung and blocked by unintentional, unnecessary controls. We try to find the best ideas about which of those controls is having the most negative impact, and we try to create testable tools to address each of those controls in turn. In that context, we sit in the OA movement with a toolkit: the Creative Commons copyright licences.”
There are indications that CC licences are meeting with increasing acceptance. The Royal Society has gone open access, with authors adopting CC licences.
JISC initially rejected the use of CC licences when it set up Jorum to promote the re-use of educational resources in the further and higher education sectors, but is reviewing its position. JISC representative Rachel Bruce says: “Ideally we wanted to use Creative Commons licences, but at the time we didn’t have the international CC UK licence.
“Because Jorum included third-party content we had to have a licensing regime robust enough to carry the risk as we were implementing it representing the HEFCE [Higher Education Funding Council for England]. Also, the legal advice before the UK Creative Commons licence was that it would not stand up in UK law.”
Bruce says that JISC projects within the repository programme are looking at using CC licences, and that JISC hopes to come out with guidance on the use of Creative Commons.
She highlights issues with the use of CC in public information. “As part of the common information environment review it was recommended we should move towards Creative Commons but the Office of Public Sector Information felt it was contrary to its licensing structure. There would be difficulties in the relationship between public sector information and information created by the universities.”
Another issue is that the versions of the CC licence that restrict commercial use do not clearly define what counts as commercial use. As these issues are worked through, often country by country, Science Commons is working on new licences specifically for scientific research and all the indications are that CC licences will play an important part in future access to scientific research.
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