CC-Huh? Fundamental Confusions About the Role of Copyright and the Reuse of Data « The Scholarly Kitchen

Recent mandates from funding agencies, including the Wellcome Trust and the RCUK, require funded journal articles to be published using a CC-BY license. Last week, OASPA and PLoS issued articles explaining the need for such licensing terms. But both articles are based on a flawed premise, confusing the rights to reuse the data behind an article with the rights to reuse the article itself... In this discussion, it is vital to understand that we are talking about the licensing terms for the article — for the set of written words and images describing the research in question, not the research itself. And this distinction is where the proponents of the CC-BY license seem to be confused.  Both Claire Redhead, writing for the OASPA, and Cameron Neylon, writing for PLoS, use the same example to explain why CC-BY is necessary: the Human Genome Project.  This is somewhat confounding, as neither of the articles announcing the initial draft of the sequence (published in Science and Nature) were published using a CC-BY license. Why, then, do the authors claim that the article licensing terms matter? ... Both have made the same mistake — confusing the genome sequence, the data behind the studies, with the articles written about those studies. The $141 generated per $1 spent ratio did not emerge through the reuse of the Science and Nature articles; the effect was generated through reuse of the studies’ data.  The licensing status of the data, and the results of a study, are not governed by the copyright terms of the journal article written about the study. Both authors are essentially right — barriers to reuse of research results do block progress, a great example being the patenting of the use of the BRCA genes in detecting breast cancer.  But that had nothing to do with the copyright status of articles published on BRCA. It had everything to do with the University of Utah locking up the information behind a patent paywall...  This seems to be a key misunderstanding in the demand for the CC-BY license, and perhaps something of a hypocritical approach by many research institutions. There’s a drive toward open access for the research articles written by authors on campus, but at the same time those universities are blocking others from reusing the research itself. It’s as if they’re saying it is vitally important that you can freely read about our breakthrough in curing cancer, but if you actually want to use that breakthrough to cure cancer, you have to pay us.  Harvard University, a leader in open access mandates for faculty, made more than $13.8 million in 2011 through patent paywalls. The University of California system made over $100 million. This reeks ofNIMBY thinking — advocating for progress that requires others to sacrifice, but refusing to accept any sacrifice on one’s own part.  If the goal is to promote the free reuse of research data, then the targets for change need to be the research institutions and the researchers themselves, not the journal publishers..."