Biologists debate how to license preprints : Nature News & Comment

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-06-17

Summary:

"Researchers have now shared more than 11,000 papers at the popular bioRxiv preprints site. But where some researchers allow their bioRxiv manuscripts to be freely redistributed and reused, others have chosen to lock them down with restrictive terms (see ‘Licence confusion’).

That split concerns Jessica Polka, the director of ASAPBio, a grass-roots organization that advocates for preprints. Polka wants authors to choose permissive licences that would allow anyone to share or adapt the work, even for profit. 'We want to maximize the public good of preprints,' she says. The US National Institutes of Health also encourages open-access preprint licences

But some researchers are wary of the approach, and that needs exploring, Polka says. So on 16 June, ASAPBio announced the creation of a taskforce to help understand attitudes towards preprint licensing. 'It's viewed as kind of a fraught issue,' says Dick Wilder, associate general counsel at the Global Health Program of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Washington DC. Wilder is chairing the taskforce, which includes researchers, legal experts, funding agencies and publishers."

Link:

http://www.nature.com/news/biologists-debate-how-to-license-preprints-1.22161

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.libre oa.versions

Date tagged:

06/17/2017, 22:25

Date published:

06/17/2017, 18:25