Here’s an example of how limitations through CC licences can change what you do with a paper.
I’m looking at an image. At first I thought to use it in a blog post about organic batteries. I thought I could do that because the paper is open access, but the licence of the paper is BY-NC-ND. Taking an image from the paper and blogging about it is pretty much making a D of it. The ND forbids derivatives, even if the point of the derivative is to say “Hey go look at this paper!” The page for the image itself has no CC licence information, so it looks like the copyright in the footer applies.
I can see why there’s the NC clause. This has its own problems, like making it unusable for things like Wikipedia, but I can see sense in it. But ND seems an odd clause for scientific papers. Surely (properly-credited) derivative works are a good thing for scientists? I can see there’s a reason for ND in artistic protection, but science papers generally aren’t works of art. Are there good reasons for Nature to have the ND clause?
I’ve trimmed the image thumbnail and description from the link because they would be derivative from original paper.
#blog #publishing #academia
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The no-derivatives thing arises from a wish for things not to be mis-used, either by people who don’t know what they’re do-ing or in some views maliciously to misrepresent the original work. Obviously I think this is misguided firstly, because as you point out, the (small) risk of mis-use is less than the (very great) risk of no use. But also because the CC licenses explicitly include protection against misrepresentation and trying to connect the downstream user with the upstream brand or credibility.
In this case the NC is very simple. It’s to protect NPG’s reprint income. For all that I disagree with them doing it, I’ll give them credit for being upfront about why they prefer it that way.
Thanks, that’s helpful. I couldn’t see why ND appear desirable. I can see why someone like an anthropologist might find that attractive then, because papers can be misrepresented. Though in all the cases where work has been misrepresented that immediately come to mind, the misrepresentation works because the original isn’t quoted and isn’t linked to.
Thats kind of my point. If you’re wanting to avoid damage from that sort of thing then licensing can’t really offer very much protection, and CC BY is as good as anything else. Of course, the only way to safely avoid being misrepresented is to never make any work available to any one
Even copyrighted stuff can be used under “fair use”, which does include brief quotes in a review.
I don’t think that quoting sections of it verbatum with proper citation constitutes making a “derivative work.”
Why should we care about such restrictions in the context of writing a blog post about an article and including an image?
Do you seriously think that NPG will go after a blogger for a copyright violation? What a PR clusterf*ck that would be.
Wiley has gone after bloggers. http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/04/wiley-interscie.html It wasn’t a PR success.
In this case I’ll be posting to AoB Blog, which is associated with Annals of Botany and AoB PLANTS. That would reduce the PR problem, because it could be painted as one publisher versus another. I don’t see NPG as a particular problem, but sooner or later you’ll meet a random nutter and I’m not keen to get a non-profit company caught in unnecessary costs, which in the UK can be massively expensive.
In the case of an image, using a photograph to report news is explicitly excluded from Fair Dealing in UK copyright law (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 30 subsection 2 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/30 )
This is the same country that the Daily Mail’s online operation is based (http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/plagiarism). I’m not claiming the law is effective, simply that I don’t want to be in the way if it does start working.
+Toma Susi yeh, its ok for a one off or a private blog but as John Wilbanks says, breaking the law doesn’t scale. If we see this as an important part of scientific discourse (which I do) then we want to make sure it can be preserved and isn’t subject to random lawyer attacks down the line.
Now civil disobediance is a different order of things I guess as is pushing the envelope on what people can get away with but we always risk losing those things because of a DMCA takedown or something along those lines.
Good points. I do of course agree that this doesn’t scale, and more comprehensive changes are definitely called for.
But if many enough people exercise civil disobedience AND e.g. NPG sees the influx of link-ins (surely no-one thinks they don’t follow these), it will surely won’t hurt in swinging their opinion “our” way.
What’s the worst thing that can happen, really?
I agree. The worst thing from my view, is that we start something up with lots of “grey” stuff, it becomes really valuable and important to the wider community and then some lawyer comes along (say NPG gets sold to a copyright troll) and either demands it comes down or demands money. No money available so we’d lose the resource…that kind of thing. All up for civil disobedience where appropriate — but for stuff we want to keep long term I think we need to be a bit careful.
Obviously Alun’s situation is a little more delicate as well because he’s doing stuff for a publisher (Full disclosure: I work for PLOS, so I work for a publisher as well).
But I do hope that research publishers do start to get the idea that incoming links are valuable and legally enable that. It’s part of my argument why we need clear licensing. It means you can do this kind of thing without worries, but also you can do anything else cool that you might imagine, also without any worries.