Blog | Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association

At OASPA, one of the criteria for membership is that a publisher must use a liberal license that encourages the reuse and distribution of content. We strongly encourage (but currently do not require) the use of the CC-BY license wherever possible.  Given recent moves in the UK by the Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils UK to mandate use of the CC-BY license when funds are used to pay for open access publishing, it is an appropriate moment to consider why CC-BY would be the optimal license for open access publishing. As emphasized by the early declarations on open access in Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin, open access is about more than access – open access removes access and reuse barriers, and thus has the potential to transform the literature into a much more powerful resource for research, education and innovation.   The field of genomics provides a prime example of open access in action. In June 2011, the Battelle Technology Partnership published a report that estimated the economic impacts of the human genome project.  The headline findings were that a $3.8billion investment by the US government towards determining the sequence of the human genome helped to drive approximately $800billion in economic output and the creation of over 300,000 jobs.  Critical to the success of this initiative was making the scientific outputs – the sequence data themselves – openly available to researchers and industry alike to use without restriction... To fully realise that potential of open access to research literature, barriers to reuse need to be removed.  The Creative Commons 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.

The most liberal Creative Commons license is CC-BY, which allows for unrestricted reuse of content, subject only to the requirement that the source work is appropriately attributed.  Other Creative Commons licenses allow for three possible restrictions to be imposed in addition to the requirement for attribution.  In keeping with its tagline 'some rights reserved', these are: No Commercial use (NC), No Derivatives (ND) and Share-Alike (SA).  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... Given the ways in which additional restrictions can limit the reach and impact of research outputs, OASPA therefore strongly encourages the use of the CC-BY license, rather than one of the more restrictive licenses or indeed a license that is ‘functionally equivalent’ to CC-BY.   We encourage the use of CC licenses, because they are very well established legal tools, and 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 (eg Flickr), in a way that is unlikely to be practical for ad hoc, publisher-specific licenses.  For example, Wikipedia moved to Creative Commons licensing in 2007, specifically to benefit from this interoperability. (A side-benefit of OA publishing under CC-BY is that all content published in this way is fully compatible with being included/excerpted/quoted in Wikipedia).  Similarly, the UK Government worked with Creative Commons to make its open data license interoperable with CC BY.  With the building momentum towards open access to research, new and established publishers are launching new open access publications and initiatives.  Many are adopting the CC-BY license, but some publishers are choosing to use more restrictive CC licenses, in particular the non-commercial license.  Various reasons are given for this, most notably that exclusive retention of the commercial rights means that the publisher can benefit from commercial reprint sales, the revenue from which can be particularly significant in medical journals, or sales to other aggregation services providing access to content.  It is argued that such additional sources of revenue help to keep publication fees at a lower level.  OASPA includes, and will currently still admit, members who use the NC restriction (but not the SA or ND restrictions)..."