Charles Oppenheim <C.Oppenheim_at_LBORO.AC.UK> wrote:
> If I offer something under a CC licence and then subsequently agree to a
> more restrictive publisher's licence, I have set up an incompatibility.
> It's equivalent to promising to sell my car to one person and later on
> promising to sell the car to another person. The earlier licence over-rides
> the second. In other words, any subsequent more restrictive licence with a
> publisher would have no validity and would be unenforceable by the
> publisher. Mind you, the publisher would be perfectly entitled to be
> annoyed with the author, and may refuse to publish the article and/or
> refuse to ever have dealings with that author again in the future.
I beg to differ. There does not exist an a priori incompatibility.
For instance, one can distribute his/her preprint with a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license which does not allow the
commercial use of the paper. Subsequently he/she can give exclusive
rights for the printing and commercialization of his/her paper to a
publisher.
By the way, this is pretty much what is being proposed in the Open
Access Law program of Science Commons:
http://sciencecommons.org/literature/oalaw
In that program the author retains the right to distribute his/her work
with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license even after the
publication.
They already have a list of 30 journals which adopted their principles:
http://sciencecommons.org/literature/oalawjournals
In my opinion, other areas of academic research should try to put
together similar programs and convince as many journals as they can to
accept these very same principles.
This would greatly enhance the possibilities and the future of
self-archiving.
Cheers,
Imre Simon
Received on Wed Oct 19 2005 - 18:09:05 BST