The "derivative works" clause has always been misapplied as a criterion
for Open Access. It certainly is not. The authors of refereed journal
articles certainly do not want to give a blanket authorisation to create
"derivative works" from their articles!
My guess is that this is unwitting (and unwanted) spill-over from some
aspects of the Creative Commons initiative. Possibly the maker of a
Disney-like cartoon may sometimes want to release his creation so that,
say, high school students (or Hollywood wannabes) can mix/match bits to
create "derivative works" from it. But this has nothing to do with Open
Access to research articles.
On the other hand, something very much like it *is* applicable to
research itself, and always has been: The *contents*, the *findings* in
a research article are freely available for "derivative works," namely,
more research and applications, building on the findings.
But this has nothing to do with licensing the *text* of the article, for
the creation of derivative texts.
I know I am a curmudgeon, but I sometimes think that others are just
somnambulists!
On the Deep Disanalogy Between Text and Software and Between Text
and Data Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2968.html
Making Ends Meet in the Creative Commons
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3798.html
Stevan Harnad
On Wed, 9 May 2007, Leslie Carr wrote:
> A round-the-houses route to a question on licensing...
>
> On 9 May 2007, at 13:01, Anja Kersting wrote:
>
> > Open access literature is defined as free of charge for users
> > providing online access to digital scholarly material worldwide.
> > Since the <http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/
> > berlindeclaration.html>Berlin Declaration on Open Access...
>
> This post prompted me to look up the open-access.net definition of
> Open Access - the original posting has a colloquial definition, the
> site itself quotes the BOAI (see the section "Was bedeutet Open
> Access"). However, going back to the Berlin Declaration mentioned
> above I realise (several years after the event) that its first
> criterion for open access includes the need to allow others to "make
> and distribute derivative works".
>
> EPrints now supports a range of licenses under which content can be
> made available, but in demoing this in various places around the
> world I have realised that (of course) as an author/researcher it
> would be quite wrong to allow individuals to make derivative copies
> of my papers. Hence I always choose the CC No-Derivatives license
> variation in the demos. The OpenDOAR Policy Generation tool includes
> as part of its optimum data licensing options the phrase "the content
> is not changed in any way", which seems to be what I want.
>
> There's a Berlin 5 conference in September - should we ask them to
> update the declaration? (The conference is appropriately subtitled
> "Consequences on Knowledge Dissemination")
> --
> Les
>
Received on Wed May 09 2007 - 16:50:38 BST