Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - CC-BY and licences; we must not get it wrong. I offer some clarification « petermr's blog

"There has been a week or two of discourse about licences for scholarly publications – much of it attempting to show that the widely used CC-BY licence (from Creative Commons) has problems. The standard of discourse (from academics) has been awful – a first year student would fail courses in logic, law, rhetoric, philosophy if they served up this stuff. The problem is that we are in great danger of using licences which restrict our action and seriously devalue academic output, while granting more rights to publishers. Given that #scholarypub is of the order of 10-15 Billion Dollars (most of which is not paid by academics, but by taxpayers, funders and students) we deserve at least an informed debate. If we don’t we are wasting (probably) > 1 billion dollars per year. I posted the following to the 'GOAL' Open-Access list. It is not easy to have a fruitful discussion on that list but I have had private mail which supports my posting. I do not guarantee the correctness of everything as licences are difficult and I’d be very happy to be corrected: 'I am disappointed by the standard of much of the discourse on this list – I had tried to refrain from posting, but the much of the material on licences is absurdly wrong. I am a member of the Science Advisory Board of Creative Commons and have some acquaintance with licences though I am not an expert. I’d like to make the following points ...'"