Licence restrictions: A fool's errand : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

Use the link to access the full text article opening as follows: "Copyright licensing is a topic usually left to law review articles, or obscure terms of service on websites, or agreements between publishers and libraries. But it is an essential element of the move towards open access — the free, immediate online availability of scholarly articles coupled with the right to use them fully in the digital environment. An article that is free to read is not necessarily open for all uses — often, it cannot be reused for text mining or in derivative works, for example. The permitted uses depend on the copyright licence used by the author.  In my view, for an article to be considered truely open access, it has to meet the widely accepted definition in the Budapest Open Access Initiative — a set of recommendations laid out by leaders of the open-access movement in 2001 ... The use of the Creative Commons attribution licence (CC-BY) fulfils the community definition of open access and avoids a future morass of articles with murky legal provenance and concomitant unclear reuse possibilities. CC-BY was launched in 2002, 2 years before I started a 7-year stint as head of science initiatives at Creative Commons in Mountain View, California.  CC-BY has now come under attack from the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, which is discussing the introduction of a licence that would implement some — but not all — of the commonly accepted tenets of open access. At a conference run by the association in January, this was referred to variously as a 'new' licence and even as 'CC Plus'.  It is a bad idea. Here's why ..."