Let’s take a close look at what SN says in its advice on this matter to authors:
"Springer Nature only ever assesses manuscripts on their editorial merit. If primary research manuscripts contain Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) language, they will not be rejected on the grounds of its inclusion, and we will not remove that text before publication if it is included in a section that is a normal part of the published primary research article."
The information gets off to a good start. Assessing manuscripts on editorial merit alone is something any author would want to be reassured about. Equally, authors will be pleased to learn that, even if they include rights retention language, SN will not amend the author’s text by removing the RR statement that the author included in the text they created and provided at no charge to SN for publication. So far, so good. The information continues:
"Authors should note, however, that manuscripts containing statements about open licensing of accepted manuscripts (AMs) can only be published via the immediate gold open access (OA) route, to ensure that authors are not making conflicting licensing commitments, and can comply with any funder or institutional requirements for immediate OA."
This is where things start to get tricksy. Translation &mdash: if the author assigns a prior licence to their AAM and submits the manuscript to a SN subscription journal that also offers an Open Access (OA) option (sometimes known as a hybrid journal), then the publisher will only accept it if the author pays for OA publication (sometimes known as ‘gold’ OA). Mind you, SN is not rejecting the manuscript outright; it’s just that they will ONLY accept it if the author pays. So by extension, if they don’t pay, SN won’t publish the paper, which amounts to a rejection. However hard I try, I can’t seem to tally "only be published via the immediate gold open access (OA) route" with "only accepting manuscripts on their editorial merit." The wording is slippery here. Like those politicians, SN doesn’t ACTUALLY state that if you don’t, won’t or can’t pay, they will reject your paper. But in practice, that is exactly what they imply. This is pure smoke and mirrors.
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Category: Creative Commons/Open Licenses
"What Can I Do with This? Indicators of Usage Rights in the User Interface "
With the continued push towards open access (OA) and the complicated nature of copyright law, users are often left wondering what they can do with the scholarly articles they find. Creative Commons (CC) licenses are the predominant mechanism for communicating usage rights; however, finding the CC license information — or being confident that there is not any — can be a challenge. Today we report on a project to investigate how publisher platforms represent CC licenses for OA and non-OA journal articles. We looked at how publishing platforms indicate usage rights for articles in results displays as well as in full-text formats.
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"The Smithsonian Puts 4.5 Million High-Res Images Online and Into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Use"
"Anyone can download, reuse, and remix these images at any time — for free under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license," write My Modern Met’s Jessica Stewart and Madeleine Muzdakis. "A dive into the 3D records shows everything from CAD models of the Apollo 11 command module to Horatio Greenough’s 1840 sculpture of George Washington."
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"Five Ways to Optimize Open Access Uptake after a Signed Read and Publish Contract: Lessons Learned from the Dutch UKB Consortium"
Consortia and publishers invest a lot of time and expertise in the negotiation process. A well-drafted read and publish contract is, however, not enough to guarantee an optimal open access publishing service. The Dutch UKB consortium uses several tools and practices to actively monitor and manage open access uptake during an agreement. Library help desks are provided with a knowledge base covering most frequently asked questions from authors. A journal list gives an integral overview of the more than 11,000 journals that are part of 16 consortium deals. Because researchers wanted to know about open access publishing possibilities from a journal perspective, a journal browser was developed. Workflow improvement and retrospective open access are regular topics in mid-term meetings with publishers, resulting in increased open access uptake. A purpose-built datahub provides the consortium and libraries with publication data that helps monitoring and managing output on both article and deal level. Finally, licence choice including funder compliance is taken into account, resulting in an increasing percentage of CC BY versus the more restricted CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-ND options.
http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.595
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"Uncommon Commons? Creative Commons Licencing in Horizon 2020 Data Management Plans"
I find that 36% of DMPs mention creative commons and among those a number of different approaches towards licencing exist (overall policy per project, licencing decisions per dataset, licencing decisions per partner, licensing decision per data format, licensing decision per perceived stakeholder interest), often clad in rather vague language with CC licences being “recommended” or “suggested”.
https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v17i1.840
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Openly Licensed Photos and AI Facial Recognition White Paper: AI_Commons
"This white paper presents the case of using openly licensed photographs for AI facial recognition training datasets. . . . The case creates an opportunity to ask fundamental questions about the challenges that open licensing faces today, related to privacy, exploitation of the commons at massive scales of use, or dealing with unexpected and unintended uses of works that are openly licensed"
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Creative Commons Report: What Are the Barriers to Open Culture?
"Using DPLA and the Wikimedia Foundation to Increase Usage of Digitized Resources"
OA Journals: "Breaking Out Open Access License Types"
"Can I Use This Publicly Available Dataset to Build Commercial AI Software? Most Likely Not"
"Abusive Copyright Litigation, Proposed Solutions, and the Implications for Creative Commons Licenses"
"The Plan S Rights Retention Strategy Is an Administrative and Legal Burden, Not a Sustainable Open Access Solution"
National Library of Sweden: Publications, and Recommendations Concerning Creative Commons Licences
"Should CC-Licensed Content be Used to Train AI? It Depends."
Paywall: "Access Shrugged: The Decline of the Copyleft and the Rise of Utilitarian Openness"
"Unsplash Releases 2 Million Images as Massive Open-Source Dataset"
Paywall: "The Interpretation of Creative Commons Licenses by US Federal Courts"
"Open Source Licenses: What, Which, and Why"
"Key Points from The UKRI Open Access Review Consultation Document"
Creative Commons: "Reproductions of Public Domain Works Should Remain in the Public Domain"
"Mozilla and Creative Commons Want to Reimagine the Internet without Ads, and They Have $100M to Do It"
"Is Creative Commons a Panacea for Managing Digital Humanities Intellectual Property Rights?"
Yi Ding has published "Is Creative Commons a Panacea for Managing Digital Humanities Intellectual Property Rights?" in Information Technology and Libraries.
Here's an excerpt:
Digital humanities is an academic field applying computational methods to explore topics and questions in the humanities field. Digital humanities projects, as a result, consist of a variety of creative works different from those in traditional humanities disciplines. Born to provide free, simple ways to grant permissions to creative works, Creative Commons (CC) licenses have become top options for many digital humanities scholars to handle intellectual property rights in the US. However, there are limitations of using CC licenses that are sometimes unknown by scholars and academic librarians. By analyzing case studies and influential lawsuits about intellectual property rights in the digital age, this article advocates for a critical perspective of copyright education and provides academic librarians with specific recommendations about advising digital humanities scholars to use CC licenses with four limitations in mind: 1) the pitfall of a free license; 2) the risk of irrevocability; 3) the ambiguity of NonCommercial and NonDerivative licenses; 4) the dilemma of ShareAlike and the open movement.
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"The Landscape of Rights and Licensing Initiatives for Data Sharing"
Sam Grabus and Jane Greenberg have published "The Landscape of Rights and Licensing Initiatives for Data Sharing" in Data Science Journal.
Here's an excerpt:
Over the last twenty years, a wide variety of resources have been developed to address the rights and licensing problems inherent with contemporary data sharing practices. The landscape of developments is this area is increasingly confusing and difficult to navigate, due to the complexity of intellectual property and ethics issues associated with sharing sensitive data. This paper seeks to address this challenge, examining the landscape and presenting a Version 1.0 directory of resources. A multi-method study was pursued, with an environmental scan examining 20 resources, resulting in three high-level categories: standards, tools, and community initiatives; and a content analysis revealing the subcategories of rights, licensing, metadata & ontologies. A timeline confirms a shift in licensing standardization priorities from open data to more nuanced and technologically robust solutions, over time, to accommodate for more sensitive data types. This paper reports on the research undertaking, and comments on the potential for using license-specific metadata supplements and developing data-centric rights and licensing ontologies.
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"Navigating 21st-Century Digital Scholarship: Open Educational Resources (OERs), Creative Commons, Copyright, and Library Vendor Licenses"
"An Open Impediment: Navigating Copyright and OER Publishing in the Academic Library"
Lindsey Gumb has published "An Open Impediment: Navigating Copyright and OER Publishing in the Academic Library" in College & Research Libraries News.
Here's an excerpt:
Most academic librarians are accustomed to assisting faculty with locating and acquiring quality, copyrighted learning resources to support the curriculum. Therefore, slightly realigning this process in order to point these individuals toward quality, openly licensed content hasn't required a significant learning curve beyond identifying appropriate open repositories for consultation. What happens, however, when these same faculty want to go beyond simply identifying and adopting OER content and ask for help in revising, remixing, and creating new content?
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