On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Roger Clarke wrote:
> Stevan Harnad has supported my argument for the appropriate CC
> licence to be applied to *pre*prints, as I argued in:
> http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_8/clarke/index.html
My colleagues Prof. Charles Oppenheim and Dr. Steve Hitchcock have since
pointed out to me that I was in error in supporting the CC license for
preprints intended for submission to peer-reviewed journals, for the following
two reasons, both of which I recognize to be correct:
(1) The implicit copyright that comes with merely posting one's own
text ("nakedly") online is sufficient to protect the author from theft
of authorship or corruption of text (which are the only two things
researchers want protection from).
(2) Adopting a prior (unnecessary) CC license for the preprint could
be in conflict with the subsequent copyright transfer agreement with
the publisher.
For both these reasons, and because all the uses the author intends
for his preprint (and postprint) are already inherent in the medium
[accessing, linking, browsing, searching, on-screen reading, downloading,
printing off (locally, for own use, not re-distribution on paper),
analyzing computationally, using/applying/building-on the content,
fair-use quoting (with attribution) and citing]. NO explicit rights
ceding or transfer is needed.
Sp neither the pre-publication pre-prints nor the post-publication postprints
need a CC license. What authors should be doing is self-archiving them, not
creating needless complications for themselves or their publishers by adopting
CC licenses for them (unless that is what the publisher's copyright agreement
specifies).
> But in relation to *post*prints, Stevan said that a copyright licence
> is unnecessary, because "the postprints are already covered by
> publisher copyright" and each paper "will have its own copyright
> transfer agreement, signed with the publisher".
>
> Sorry Stevan, but your analysis is flawed, and your conclusion wrong.
>
> Postprints (permitted by Sherpa Blue and Green journals, and of
> course where the author retains the copyright) will be downloaded by
> people.
>
> People need to know what terms apply to those copies. The agreement
> between the author and the journal-publisher does not solve that
> problem.
People need to know nothing more about those downloads than they know
and need to know about any other free web downloads, viz: accessing,
linking, browsing, searching, on-screen reading, downloading, printing
off (locally, for own use, not re-distribution on paper), analyzing
computationally, using/applying/building-on the content, fair-use quoting
(with attribution) and citing. All these come with the territory.
And that is all that OA amounts to; that's all the user needs; and
that's all the author needs/wants the user to have.
No re-publishing online or on paper, no re-use in other works (other than
attributed quotes and use of content rather than text), no re-distribution
rights on paper or online, apart from what comes with linking -- unless
allowed by the publisher's copyright agreement.
> I do completely support Stevan's proposition that "authors don't need
> more burdens, nor more worries". So applying the licence to both
> preprints and postprints needs to be very easy. To achieve that (I
> argued in the papers), it needs to be the automatic-but-over-ridable
> default.
Since the license is neither necessary nor advisable, the only way to make it
easy is not to adopt one at all.
> I'd be pleased to assist repository-managers to make it easy for
> authors to make the By-NC-ND licence available.
It no doubt well-meaning of Roger Clarke to offer assistance to make it
easy for authors to make a licence available, but the best assistance
Roger could offer -- if he means to be assisting OA rather than something
else -- is to make it clear that the author does not need to adopt a
license at all, for either preprint or postprint. All he needs to do in
order to provide OA is to self-archive.
Self-archiving is already at least a decade overdue. Please let us not make
the coming of age of CC licensing yet another occasion for putting gratuitous
obstacles in the clear path to 100% OA.
Stevan Harnad
Received on Wed Oct 19 2005 - 01:37:14 BST