An OA publisher’s perspective on CC-BY | Australian Open Access Support Group

As the Director of the University of Adelaide Press, I am participating in the Humanities and Social Sciences session in the OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association) conference in Latvia, Riga later this month. OASPA was initially set up to group together Open Access journal publishers, and now is keen to include book publishers, in all disciplines. At present, which is why I am speaking, OASPA require that their members not only have published at least one Open Access book, but also that it is published with a licence that allows the 'broadest re-use of published material possible'. Their preference is the ‘CC-BY’ licence, now required by the United Kingdom funding bodies if they fund research, the European Union, and increasingly other funding bodies around the world. I do not believe this licence is automatically appropriate for Humanities and Social Sciences which generally publish in books ...  The CC-BY licence not only allows all readers the free, open access to the text, and to share it and quote it, but also to adapt it and create what they call, mysteriously, 'derivative works'.  There is no requirement for these derivative works to be subjected to the same rigorous peer-reviewing before publishing that the original work had to pass.  It also allows them to commercialise their derivative work, without needing to share the profits with the original author, the only condition being that they attribute the original work.  No one yet has explained what a derivative work is to me, and even in the legal language of the licence itself, it remains a vague term ... As an author of books myself, I am concerned about a licence allowing someone to take the results of years of original research, largely written in donated time, reword it, change it, and then turn a profit from it.  Of the people I have talked to who insist on the single use of the CC-BY licence, I wonder how many of them have published a book?   On the other hand, I believe that the Creative Commons licences are essential for Open Access publishing to work efficiently and effectively.  The University of Adelaide Press will be introducing them in future titles, but will allow authors to choose which one suits their work."