Creative Commons licenses in
scholarly and scientific
publishing – an idea whose
time has come
Ronja Addams-Moring
ISCRAM2007 conference
Round Table presentation

Disclaimer
• The views, interpretations and opinions
expressed in this presentation are mine
• There certainly are similarities with some
other persons' views but that is not their
responsibility
• Feel free to copy, distribute, criticize,
ignore or form derivative opinions as you
see fit

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Presentation outline
• Task analysis: What we researchers do
• Requirements: What we need
• Historical overview
• Current practices
• Choosing our approach
• Which CC license(s) fit?
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Task analysis
• A simplified ”circle of life” of scientific-
scholarly knowledge
1) Researcher A publishes a new result
2) Based on A’s result, other researchers
create more new knowledge
3) Researcher A uses other researchers’
results as input for more research
4) The process repeats: Body of Knowledge
grows larger and better with each ”round”
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Requirements
• The essential necessities
– Access to previous publications
– Visibility of own work
– Plus a multitude of things not addressed here
• Coffee!
• Equipment!
• Finding the relevant previous publications!
• Funding
• Colleagues, students and staff
• etc
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Historical overview 1(3)
• Before 1886 only national laws
– Problem: legal to print and sell e.g. a Belgian book in
France without author’s permission
– Solution: international copyright conventions
– New problem: public domain only alternative
• Copyright protects the form (wording, lay-out,
typography, pictures, etc) for ca. 100 years
• Copyright does not protect ideas or solution
principles (that’s what patents are for)
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Historical overview 2(3)
• 1980ies: Richard M. Stallman: Emacs, GNU
– Problem: RMS shared source code with a friend who
developed it, sold it and the buyer forbade RMS to
use any of the friend’s code
– Solution: GNU GPL, first copyleft license
• The copyleft innovation: share-alike
– The license sticks to the work and its derivatives
forever (”strong copyleft”)
• Limitation of strong copyleft’s social
acceptability: absolute, all-in-one, no degrees,
no exceptions
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Historical overview 3(3)
• Many other approaches; attempts to
remedy strong copyleft’s shortcomings
• 2001 Creative Commons
– authors choose which rights they license
• Meanwhile, the cost for university libraries
of offering journals has skyrocketed
– 1986-2005: +302% serial expenditures (ARL)
• Economic possibilities of offering
monographs are growing ever slimmer?
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Current practices
• Scholarly and scientific publishers
– Many require that author gives away copyright
– Each has own principles and practices
– Each has own vocabulary (“dialect of legalese”)
 Author must learn all or check every time what (s)he
may do with own work
• Creative Commons (CC) offers
– Author keeps copyright, licenses work to users
– Standardized vocabulary & ready-made legal jargon
– Well-known ”brand”
– Easy enough user interface for author and user
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Example 1(4)
• Springer, Natural Hazards (1st issue March 1988)
• “An author
– may self-archive an author-created version of his/her article
on his/her own website and his/her institution's repository,
including his/her final version;
– …may not use the publisher's PDF version which is posted
on www.springerlink.com. Furthermore, the author may only
post his/her version
– provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of
publication and a link is inserted to the published article on
Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the
following text: \"The original publication is available at
www.springerlink.com\".”
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Example 2(4)
• Blackwell Publishing, Disasters (1st issue March 1997)
• “you may use the accepted version of the Article …
updated … after peer review…
– you may share print or electronic copies of the Article with
colleagues;
– you may use all or part of the Article and abstract, without
revision or modification, in personal compilations or other
publications of your own work;
– you may use the Article within your employer’s institution or
company for educational or research purposes, including use in
course packs;
– 24 months after publication you may post an electronic
version of the Article on your own personal website, on your
employer’s website/repository and on free public servers in
your subject area.”
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Example 3(4)
• Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency
Management (1st issue May 2003); semi-open
• “The following uses are always permitted to the
author(s) ... provided … does not alter the articles …:
– Storage and back-up of the article … provided that the article
… is not readily accessible by persons other than the author(s);
– Posting of the article on the author(s) personal website,
provided that the website is non-commercial;
– Posting of the article on the internet as part of a non-
commercial open access institutional repository or other
non-commercial open access publication site affiliated with the
author(s)'s place of employment …;
– Posting of the article on a non-commercial course website for
a course being taught by the author at the university or college
employing the author.”
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Example 4(4)
• Open Medicine (1st issue 18th April 2007)
• “Open Medicine applies the Creative
Commons Attribution NonCommercial
ShareAlike License …
• because … there should be no financial
barriers to access to information that can
benefit medical practice. … authors
should retain copyright to the article they
have worked so hard to produce.”
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What makes a great idea?
• It is right, because
• In case any of e.g. these apply
– Research is done with public funds
– The results influences public spending
– Research addresses the well-being of the
general public (medicine, social psychology,
political science, ISCRAM…)
• Then that research should be fully public
– Available to be freely utilized
– Open to critical comments from all
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What makes a great idea?
• It is (often) profitable, because
• Open access to electronic versions
boosts sales of printed versions
(National Academic Press, since 1994)
• Open access -> higher impact (JHSEM)
• Problem: funding of some academic
societies
• One solution: HTML is free, small(ish)
sum for ”neater” PDF (Amer. Scientist)
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What makes a great idea?
• It is fun! because
1. It really annoys an established industry who
is making a lot of money
2. It’s legal
3. It gets you excited to get out of bed every
morning
• John Buckman (2007) How to piss off the Music
Industry for Fun and Profit. PDF via:
http://blogs.magnatune.com/buckman/2007/05/how_t
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Choosing our approach
• Why should we authorize anyone to ”hide” our
work? (Blackwell, Elsevier & Co.)
• Why would we agree to keep track of N
different copyright systems?
• Why would we pay or work extra to make our
work fully public? (Kluver, ACM & Co.)
• Why do we require reader identification?
(ISCRAM, JHSEM & Co.)
• What else needs to be considered?
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Which CC license(s) fit?
a) The individual researcher
b) A professional community as publisher
c) The scientific-scholarly community
• Attribution (by) – always included
• NonCommercial (nc) – smart, realistic
• ShareAlike (sa) or NoDerivatives (nd) –
that is the question
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My answer
• I want my work to be used & I like to get paid
• Therefore, this work is licensed under the
Creative Commons license Attribution Non-
Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
– Attribution form: Ronja Addams-Moring (2007)
”Creative Commons licenses in scholarly and
scientific publishing – an idea whose time has
come”. Round Table presentation 14th May at the
ISCRAM2007 conference, Delft, NL, EU.
– The license terms are available via:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.en
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What say you?
• Each of us should make her or his own copyright/left
decisions (with co-authors, preferably before starting)
• Our decisions should be documented in such a manner
that others can easily understand them: therefore CC?
 ISCRAM conferences may need two CC licenses in the
future: by+nc for all, plus a choise: sa or nd
• Thank you for your time! Let’s talk more during these
conference days.
• http://www.iki.fi/~ronja/
• http://no-fate-but-what-we-make.blogspot.com/
• ronja [at] iki [dot] fi ; skype: ronja-am
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See for yourself, starters
• http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/me
• Hal Abelson on MIT Open Courseware:
http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_40/Abelson
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
• Ethical background: Steven Levy (1984)
Hackers. Dell Publishing, New York, NY,
USA. ISBN: 0-440-13405-6.
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