Creative Commons/Open Licenses – Page 3

DPLA, Creative Commons, Europeana, and Partners Launch RightsStatements.org

The Digital Public Library of America, the Creative Commons, Europeana, and other partners have launched RightsStatements.org .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In May 2015, the International Rights Statements Working Group released two white papers with our recommendations for establishing standardized rights statements for describing copyright and reuse status of digital cultural heritage materials, and the enabling technical infrastructure for those statements. After working for nearly a year to implement the recommendations of the white papers, the Digital Public Library of America and Europeana are proud to announce the launch of RightsStatements.org.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

Creative Commons Integration, from A to Z

The Creative Commons has released Creative Commons Integration, from A to Z.

Here's an excerpt:

What: This toolkit covers the elements for a basic Creative Commons platform integration, including aligning legal terms to CC tools; installing the CC license chooser; displaying CC licensed content with the correct logos and links; and how to communicate CC to your users.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Creative Commons Licenses: Empowering Open Access"

Thomas Margoni and Diane M. Peters have self-archived "Creative Commons Licenses: Empowering Open Access."

Here's an excerpt:

Open access (OA) is a concept that in recent years has acquired popularity and widespread recognition. International statements and scholarly analysis converge on the following main characteristics of open access: free availability on the public Internet, permission for any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, and link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, and use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself. The only legal constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

Requirements for the Technical Infrastructure for Standardized International Rights Statements

International Rights Statements Working Group has released Requirements for the Technical Infrastructure for Standardized International Rights Statements.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Over the past fifteen months, representatives from the Europeana and DPLA networks, in partnership with Creative Commons, have been developing a collaborative approach to internationally interoperable rights statements that can be used to communicate the copyright status of cultural objects published via the DPLA and Europeana platforms.

The purpose of these rights statements is to provide end users of our platforms with easy to understand information on what they can and cannot do with digital items that they encounter via these platforms. Having standardized interoperable rights statements will also make it easier for application developers and other third parties to automatically identify items that can be re-used.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

Creative Commons Gets $450,000 Arcadia Fund Grant to support Open Access Publishing

The Creative Commons has received a $450,000 grant from the Arcadia Fund support open access publishing.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Creative Commons will use funds from Arcadia to develop tools that complement the current CC license suite and empower authors to retain or regain their right to publish so they can make their scholarly and academic works available for public use.

Building on the success of the current CC licenses—now with nearly 1 billion licenses in use across over 9 million websites—Creative Commons is enthusiastic about developing tools that can be used by authors who "write to be read" but face all too common barriers to making their research openly available. These resources will be developed for global use, taking into account country-specific copyright laws, customs, and language. Once in widespread use, these tools are expected to increase the number of articles and publications that are available for broad public use. . . .

Collaborators on this project include Authors Alliance, Free Culture Trust, and SPARC, all of whom are dedicated to supporting authors, institutions, and the public in promoting access to research and scholarly work.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

Creative Commons License Court Decision: "Defining Derivatives"

Kevin Smith has published "Defining Derivatives" in Scholarly Communications @ Duke in which he discusses the Drauglis V. Kappa Map Group decision. In this case, a photographer sued a publisher who used his CC BY-SA licensed photo on Flickr without permission.

Here's an excerpt:

One thing that is clear, and this is my second point, is that a Share Alike provision does not require that the second work be made available for free, as long as a derivative is not created. The compilation atlas containing Drauglis' photo was sold, of course, and the court said that was OK because there was no non-commercial restriction on the license and the commercial work was not a derivative (which would activate the share alike restriction).

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Better Sharing Through Licenses? Measuring the Influence of Creative Commons Licenses on the Usage of Open Access Monographs"

Ronald Snijder has published "Better Sharing Through Licenses? Measuring the Influence of Creative Commons Licenses on the Usage of Open Access Monographs" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

The application of open licenses to books does not, on its own, lead to more downloads. However, open licenses pave the way for intermediaries to offer new discovery and aggregation services. These services play an important role by amplifying the impacts of open access licensing in the case of scholarly books.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Creative Commons Confusion Continues to Confound Content Creators"

David Crotty has published "Creative Commons Confusion Continues to Confound Content Creators" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Yahoo!, owners of the photo sharing site Flickr, recently caused a storm of controversy by announcing plans to sell prints of photos that users had uploaded. Yahoo!'s plans included sharing 51% of revenue with users who had retained copyright on their photos. For those who voluntarily selected a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) for their works, no compensation was offered. Despite the fact that Yahoo! was explicitly following the terms of the license, and doing exactly what the license was designed to promote, users were up in arms over seeing a large corporation taking advantage of their labors.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

State of the Commons

The Creative Commons has released State of the Commons.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Today, we're releasing a new report that we think you will want to see. State of the Commons covers the impact and success of free and open content worldwide, and it contains the most revealing account we've ever published, including new data on what's shared with a CC license.

We found nearly 900 million Creative Commons-licensed works, dramatically up from our last report of 400 million in 2010. Creators are now choosing less restrictive CC licenses more than ever before – over half allow both commercial use and adaptations.

We're also celebrating the success of open policy worldwide. Fourteen countries have now adopted national open education policies, and open textbooks have saved students more than 100 million dollars. These are big moves making big impacts.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Case Study of a Book Published under a Creative Commons License

Here's a brief case study of how one book under a Creative Commons license evolved and was accessed.

In 2005, the Association of Research Libraries published my book, the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. With ARL's agreement, I made an open access PDF available on Digital Scholarship.

In 2006, I converted the book into an open access XHTML website and published the Open Access Bibliography Author Index and the Open Access Bibliography Title Index.

In 2008, I worked with Open Access Directory staff to convert it to wiki format and publish it as the basis for the Bibliography of Open Access.

In 2010, I published Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography as an open access PDF file, an open access XHTML website, and a low-cost paperback. All versions of the bibliography were under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License. This derivative work was an updated version of the Open Access Bibliography that was more narrowly focused on scholarly treatments of open access.

Below are the Digital Scholarship use statistics for the two books as of October 31, 2014. In this analysis, only HTML files or PDF files are counted as "page views"; image files and other supporting website files are excluded. This analysis also excludes spider use.

Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals: over 355,000 page views.
Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography: over 152,000 page views.

That's a total of over 507,000 page views. For the measured time period, about 7.9% of all file requests to Digital Scholarship failed. Consequently, I'll eliminate 7.9% of the above page views and estimate that there were over 466,000 successful page views. This tally does not include any access statistics from ARL or the OAD (nor does it include paperback sales).

If the multi-file HTML versions of the books are eliminated from consideration, the two books still had a total of over 173,000 PDF requests (excluding spider requests), adjusted to an estimated 159,000 plus successful PDF requests.

To put these use statistics in perspective, in 2005, Willis Regier (Director of the University of Illinois Press) estimated that the typical university press book sold between 400 to 800 copies.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"STM’s New Publishing Licenses Raise Antitrust Concerns Amid Wider Efforts to Pollute Open Access Standards"

Ariel Katz has published "STM's New Publishing Licenses Raise Antitrust Concerns Amid Wider Efforts to Pollute Open Access Standards" in LSE Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

For antitrust purposes, when a group of publishers adopts a set of uniform licenses, or when it recommends that its members adopt them, they tread in the area of antitrust law's core concern: "price fixing". In antitrust lingo the term price fixing is not limited to coordinating on price, but applies to any coordination that affects the quantity, quality, or any other feature of the product. Indeed, "[t]erms of use are no less a part of 'the product,'"[1] and competition between publishers is supposed to ensure optimal license terms just as it is expected to guarantee competitive prices. Therefore, when a group of publishers coordinates license terms, their concerted action is not conceptually different for antitrust purposes from a decision to coordinate subscription fees (downstream) or submission fees (upstream), and when the group represents the leading publishers and affects the majority of publications, antitrust concerns are further heightened.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

STM Releases Its Own Open Access Licenses

The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has released its own collection of open access licenses.

Here's an excerpt:

STM believes that publishers should have the tools to offer a wide variety of appropriate licensing terms dependent on their economic model and business strategy. To that end, the Association has produced sample licences for a variety of uses within open access publishing.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Impact of Public Domain Resources On Public Libraries in the United States"

Anne Arendt and Dustin Fife have published "Impact of Public Domain Resources On Public Libraries in the United States" in the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science.

Here's an excerpt:

Ownership and rights issues relating to electronic resources can be a source of angst, confusion and litigation. This is due in part to the automatic copyright many individuals receive, including in the United States, upon creation of an original work. However, there are options available for relaxing these rights. One of these options is Creative Commons Zero. . . . Based on the above, this document researches the awareness, complexity and effects of Creative Commons Zero and related licenses on libraries as perceived by library directors and managers across the United States. In order to accomplish this, a quantitative survey was administered in an anonymous web-based format.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

Only 20.56 % of Jounals in DOAJ Use CC BY or CC BY-SA License

The post "CC-BY Dominates under the Creative Commons licensed Journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)" analyzes the use of Creative Commons licences by journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Here's an excerpt:

A total of 2,016 (or 20.56 %) of the guided journal in DOAJ therefore use a license (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA), which is compatible with the requirements of the Open Definition and allow a restriction-free use of the contents within the meaning of Open Access defined the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the RCUK Open Access policy and the Berlin Declaration.

If we consider the subset of journals that use any CC license that the claims of the Open Definition sufficient licenses dominate even slightly: About 54% of all journals that use a CC license , use either CC-BY ( 52.77 %) or CC-BY-SA (1.40 %). Surprisingly low is the proportion of journals which use the most restrictive CC license CC-BY-NC-ND : Only 737 journals (7.52 % of all journals and 19.80% under the CC-licensed journals). This license variant neither allows edits or allows to create derivative works (such as translations) nor a commercial use is possible. Surprisingly allow more than half (2,060, 55.35 %) of which is under a CC license Journals a commercial exploitation of the contents, only 44.65% (1662) prohibit this.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

Creative Commons 4.0 Licenses Released

The Creative Commons has released version 4.0 of its licenses.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

We proudly introduce our 4.0 licenses, now available for adoption worldwide. The 4.0 licenses—more than two years in the making—are the most global, legally robust licenses produced by CC to date. We have incorporated dozens of improvements that make sharing and reusing CC-licensed materials easier and more dependable than ever before.

We had ambitious goals in mind when we embarked on the versioning process coming out of the 2011 CC Global Summit in Warsaw. The new licenses achieve all of these goals, and more. The 4.0 licenses are extremely well-suited for use by governments and publishers of public sector information and other data, especially for those in the European Union. This is due to the expansion in license scope, which now covers sui generis database rights that exist there and in a handful of other countries.

Among other exciting new features are improved readability and organization, common-sense attribution, and a new mechanism that allows those who violate the license inadvertently to regain their rights automatically if the violation is corrected in a timely manner.

You can find highlights of the most significant improvements on our website, track the course of the public discussion and evolution of the license drafts on the 4.0 wiki page, and view a recap of the central policy decisions made over the course of the versioning process.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

"The Diamond Model of Open Access Publishing: Why Policy Makers, Scholars, Universities, Libraries, Labour Unions and the Publishing World Need to Take Non-Commercial, Non-Profit Open Access Serious"

Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval have published "The Diamond Model of Open Access Publishing: Why Policy Makers, Scholars, Universities, Libraries, Labour Unions and the Publishing World Need to Take Non-Commercial, Non-Profit Open Access Serious" in tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique: Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society.

Here's an excerpt:

In the Diamond Open Access Model, not-for-profit, non-commercial organizations, associations or networks publish material that is made available online in digital format, is free of charge for readers and authors and does not allow commercial and for-profit re-use.

The fact that Diamond Open Access (DOA) has a digital format does not hinder that it is also made available in the form of printed publications in addition. We consider it as part of the model that publishers can charge for the actual printing costs without making monetary profits, but provide the digital version without charges. Publication "free of charge" means that neither authors nor individual readers nor institutions such as libraries have to pay for obtaining access to the literature published under the Diamond Open Access Model. Also authors or their institutions do not have to pay publication fees, article processing charges or other fees for getting articles published.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

"Creative Commons: Challenges and Solutions for Researchers; A Publisher’s Perspective of Copyright in an Open Access Environment"

Nicola Gulley has published "Creative Commons: Challenges and Solutions for Researchers; A Publisher's Perspective of Copyright in an Open Access Environment" in the latest issue of Insights: The UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Copyright in the digital environment is evolving at an unprecedented rate. Copyright exists to protect the rights of an owner of an original piece of work by imposing restrictions on re-use but it does not always fit well with how we use and share information in the digital sphere.

The growth of open access (OA) publishing has also added to the challenge as the right to reuse as well as read content has been emphasized.

Creative Commons (CC) licences were introduced to try and bridge the gaps between the barriers imposed by traditional copyright and the realities of the digital environment but, as they are general licences, it is not always clear how they apply to specific situations.

This article addresses some of the key questions around how the various licences can be applied in academic publishing, what some of the consequences are, and how they affect different research areas.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

The Future of Creative Commons

The Creative Commons have released The Future of Creative Commons.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

During our review, we spent a lot of time asking questions and listening to our Affiliate Network members around the world. We hired some consultants to help run a process and to talk to people outside of the organization about how they viewed the role of Creative Commons. As navel-gazing goes, we gave it a solid effort. We also realized how important it is to declare our mission, vision, and priorities for action. The resulting publication, The Future of Creative Commons (2.7 MB PDF), lays out priorities for each area in which we work. These overall priorities are already guiding staff in how they use their time and set targets for each program area. They also give us a good base to measure how well we are doing.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

"Licensing Revisited: Open Access Clauses in Practice"

Birgit Schmidt and Kathleen Shearer have published "Licensing Revisited: Open Access Clauses in Practice" in the Future Issue section of LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

Open access increases the visibility and use of research outputs and promises to maximize the return on our public investment in research. However, only a minority of researchers will "spontaneously" deposit their articles into an open access repository. Even with the growing number of institutional and funding agency mandates requiring the deposit of papers into the university repository, deposit rates have remained stubbornly low. As a result, the responsibility for populating repositories often falls onto the shoulders of library staff and/or repository managers. Populating repositories in this way—which involves obtaining the articles, checking the rights, and depositing articles into the repository—is time consuming and resource intensive work.

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), a global association of repository initiatives and networks, is promoting a new strategy for addressing some of the barriers to populating repositories, involving the use of open access archiving clauses in publisher licenses. These types of clauses are being considered by consortia and licensing agencies around the world as a way of ensuring that all the papers published by a given publisher are cleared for deposit into the institutional repository. This paper presents some use cases of open access archiving clauses, discusses the major barriers to implementing archiving language into licenses, and describes some strategies that organizations can adopt in order to include such clauses into publisher licenses.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography: "This work gives an outstanding overview of scholarship relating to the growing Open Access movement." — George Machovec, The Charleston Advisor 12, no. 2 (2010): 3. | Digital Scholarship |

Wiley Open Access Program Adopts Creative Commons Attribution Licence

Effective immediately, journals in the Wiley Open Access program will use the Creative Commons Attribution Licence for articles.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Rachel Burley, Vice President and Director, Open Access, commented, "Wiley is committed to meeting the evolving needs of the authors who wish to provide open access to the published articles that convey the results of their research."

Burley continued, "Our announcement today concerns Wiley’s fully open access journals. We are also reviewing the licensing arrangements for our hybrid program OnlineOpen, our open access option for individual articles published in subscription journals. In consultation with our publishing partners, we aim to continue to develop and deliver sustainable open access products providing author choice and high levels of service."

In the first instance, the journals moving to the CC-BY licence are Brain and Behavior, Ecology and Evolution, MicrobiologyOpen, Cancer Medicine, Food Science & Nutrition, Evolutionary Applications, Geoscience Data Journal and EMBO Molecular Medicine.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Government Response to the Finch Group Report: ‘Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications’"

David Willetts, the UK Minister for Science and Universities, has issued "Government Response to the Finch Group Report: 'Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications'."

Here's an excerpt:

The Government has listened carefully to what publishers, learned societies and the Finch Group collectively have had to say on this issue. We prefer the 'gold' over the 'green' model, especially where the research is taxpayer funded so the Government agrees with the sentiment expressed in the Finch Report. Embargo periods allowed by funding bodies for publishers should be short where publishers have chosen not to take up the preferred option of their receiving an Article Processing Charge (which provides payment in full for immediate publication by the 'gold OA' route). Where APC funds are not available to the publisher or learned society, for the publication of publicly-funded research, then publishers could reasonably insist on a longer more equitable embargo period. This could be up to 12 months for science, technology and engineering publications and longer for publications in those disciplines which require more time to secure payback. Even so, publications with embargo periods longer than two years may find it difficult to argue that they are also serving the public interest.

| Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals | Digital Scholarship |

Research Councils UK Adopts New Open Access Policy

The Research Councils UK has adopted a new open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Research Councils UK (RCUK) has today, 16th July 2012, unveiled its new Open Access policy. Informed by the work of the National Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, chaired by Professor Dame Janet Finch, the policy at once harmonises and makes significant changes to existing Research Councils' Open Access policies. . . .

The new policy, which will apply to all qualifying publications being submitted for publication from 1 April 2013, states that peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils:

must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access, and;

must include details of the funding that supported the research, and a statement on how the underlying research materials such as data, samples or models can be accessed.

Criteria which journals must fulfill to be compliant with the Research Councils' Open Access policy are detailed within the policy, but include offering a 'pay to publish'; option or allowing deposit in a subject or institutional repository after a mandated maximum embargo period. In addition, the policy mandates use of 'CC-BY', the Creative Commons 'Attribution' license, when an APC is levied. The CC_BY licence allows others to modify, build upon and/or distribute the licensed work (including for commercial purposes) as long as the original author is credited.

The Research Councils will provide block grants to eligible UK Higher Education Institutions, approved independent research organisations and Research Council Institutes to support payment of the Article Processing Charges (APCs) associated with 'pay-to-publish'. In parallel, eligible organisations will be expected to set-up and manage their own publication funds. The Research Councils will work with eligible organisations to discuss the detail of the new approach to funding APCs and to ensure that appropriate and auditable mechanisms are put in place to manage the funds.

Along with HEFCE and other relevant Funding Bodies, we shall monitor these policies actively, both to review their effects and to ensure that our joint objectives on Open Access are being met.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Taking Stock of the Creative Commons Experiment: Monitoring the Use of Creative Commons Licenses and Evaluating Its Implications for the Future of Creative Commons and for Copyright Law"

Giorgos Cheliotis, Warren Chik, Ankit Guglani, and Giri Kumar Tayi have self-archived "Taking Stock of the Creative Commons Experiment: Monitoring the Use of Creative Commons Licenses and Evaluating Its Implications for the Future of Creative Commons and for Copyright Law" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

We provide data demonstrating the popularity of CC, examine which specific license types within the CC framework are most popular, and then identify contributing factors for the relative popularity of some of the license types. This includes individual author incentives, the consistency and aims of the online communities which adopt CC as a licensing model, the underlying medium (text, photography, audio, video or interactive
content), the intended use of the work, as well as the sociopolitical, legal and economic background of the jurisdictions where the works are being produced. We show that the spread of the licenses is global and encompasses both developed and developing nations with varied cultural and historical backgrounds, which we claim is indicative of a general social shift towards more open collaboration and the rise of a new global consciousness of sharing and participation across national borders. . . . In conclusion we examine to what extent copyright law and policy should be informed by the needs and choices of this new generation of authors adopting CC licenses, also taking into consideration the changing interests of society in the digital age.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Copyright Law in the Digital Environment: Private Ordering and the Regulation of Digital Works"

Primavera De Filippi has self-archived "Copyright Law in the Digital Environment: Private Ordering and the Regulation of Digital Works" in HAL.

Here's an excerpt:

The book begins with an analysis of copyright law as it applies to the physical and the digital world. The challenges that the law has to face in the digital environment are specifically addressed by illustrating how the self-regulating features of the copyright regime have been jeopardized with the advent of Internet and digital technologies. The book subsequently analyses the role of private ordering in the regulation of information and presents the various mechanisms of self-help that have been developed so far to address the challenges of the digital world. The contrast is between the use of end-user licensing agreements and technological measures of protection (e.g. DRM) intended to restrict the consumption of digital works beyond the scope of the copyright regime, and the use of Open Content licenses (e.g. Creative Commons) intended to support a greater dissemination and broader availability of works, amidst other goals. The book finally investigates the corresponding advantages and drawbacks of these two divergent approaches, and concludes by addressing the justifications for governmental intervention in regulating the operations of private ordering.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog | Digital Scholarship |

Free a Book: Unglue.it Launches

Unglue.it has launched.

Here's an excerpt from the Frequently Asked Questions:

Unglue.it is a place for individuals and institutions to join together to give their favorite ebooks to the world. We work with rights holders to decide on fair compensation for releasing a free, legal edition of their already-published books, under Creative Commons licensing. Then everyone pledges toward that sum. When the threshold is reached (and not before), we collect the pledged funds and we pay the rights holders. They issue an unglued digital edition; you're free to read and share it, with everyone, on the device of your choice, worldwide.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography| Digital Scholarship |