Exclusive licence to publish – now here’s a thing | Plan S

by Sally Rumsey, Jisc’s cOAlition S OA Expert Imagine this scenario. You’ve written an article and want to make it Open Access (OA). To do this, you submit it to a journal that enables gold OA, i.e. the publisher makes the article immediately OA on publication. You decide to apply a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND licence to your manuscript. This licence does not allow users, by default, to make commercial use (NC=non-commercial) nor derivatives (ND=no derivatives) unless they receive a corresponding authorisation. On acceptance, the publisher of the journal presents you with a Licence to Publish (LTP). This is where the problems surrounding the assignment of the CC-BY-NC-ND licence start. The LTP comprises the grant of a licence to the publisher by you, the original copyright holder and licensor, required for the publisher to publish your article. It also includes a long list of Terms & Conditions created by the publisher. For now, I’ll skate over the fact that you, as the author, are the original copyright holder, and as such, it is you who grants the LTP. Nevertheless, the LTP and its terms and conditions are written by the publisher using their terms – I have written about this unacceptable cock-eyed situation previously (see Licence to publish – the boot is on the wrong foot). [...]