Does membership of OASPA require a specific type of license?
Why does OASPA recommend the Creative Commons licenses?
To fully realise the potential of open access to research literature, barriers to reuse need to be removed. The Creative Commons (CC) licenses have emerged as an effective legal instrument to achieve this. Instead of transferring rights exclusively to publishers (the approach usually followed in subscription publishing), authors grant a non-exclusive license to the publisher to distribute the work, and all users and readers are granted rights to reuse the work.
We encourage the use of CC licenses, not only because they are very well established legal tools, but because they have the benefits of simplicity, machine-readability and interoperability. Importantly, many elements of internet infrastructure ‘understand’ CC licensing, and can display and filter content appropriately, based on this machine-readable license information (e.g. Flickr), in a way that is unlikely to be practical for ad hoc, publisher-specific licenses.
Why does OASPA encourage use of the CC-BY license in particular?
Does OASPA allow organisations to be members if they use any other types of Creative Commons license?
Why is CC-BY preferable to CC-BY-NC?
There are two key problems with a no commercial use restriction. The first is that the definition of what constitutes commercial use is necessarily fuzzy, and so any license which restricts commercial use creates a haze of doubt around various uses that may or may not be at risk of being considered commercial, and in doing so acts as a general discouragement to reuse.
In the case of scientific research, work is not funded by taxpayers and companies purely to serve as a resource to further academic discussion and debate. A major justification for the large-scale research investment is that it will produce new knowledge, the application of which will help to develop and enrich our society. Enabling the commercial sector to have access to and freedom to reuse research literature for knowledge discovery and the development of tools and services (as exemplified by the human genome project) is a natural way to seek to achieve these ends. See also: Why Full Open Access Matters.
Why doesn’t OASPA allow CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC-ND licenses?
Each type of restriction has its uses, for certain types of content and certain types of sharing. But the emerging consensus on the adoption of CC-BY reflects the fact that any of these restrictions needlessly limits the possible reuse of published research.
CC-BY-SA: Share-Alike. Material distributed under a share-alike license can be used to create and distribute derivative works, but only if those works are shared under the same Share-Alike license. Such licenses are sometimes referred to as Viral licenses, as “the licenses spread a continuing use of the licenses in its derivatives”. However, while such licenses can be extremely helpful in building up a collection of content, they also have downsides in terms of the limitations they place on reuse. For example, material distributed within a Share-Alike article could only be combined and redistributed with other share-alike content. In contrast, CC-BY content can be combined with any content, and redistributed according to the terms of that other content, as long as CC-BY’s own attribution requirement is respected. This makes CC-BY something like a universal donor blood-type in that it has maximal compatibility.
CC-BY-NC-ND: No Derivatives. Derived use is fundamental to the way in which scholarly research builds on what has gone before. One of the many benefits of open access publishing is that elements such as figures from a published research article can be reused, with attribution, as part of teaching material, or in other published works, without needing to request permission of the publisher. Similarly, article translations, image libraries, case report databases, text-mining enhancements and data visualisations are all examples of how additional value can be created by allowing derivative use.
