News - Open Licensing and the Open Library of Humanities

"To date, OLH has steered authors towards more liberal Creative Commons licenses (i.e. CC BY) but has allowed editorial teams some latitude to allow more restrictive clauses (CC BY-ND). Recently, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the central indexer and quality verification service for open-access journals, wrote to us noting that CC BY-ND is incompatible with titles having the “DOAJ seal”. The DOAJ Seal “is awarded to journals that demonstrate best practice in open access publishing”. The Seal is an important mark in many ways for the libraries that support OLH because it guarantees a set of technical standards and integrations that are helpful. We would like our titles to have the DOAJ Seal where possible. That said, we face some challenges. While many authors are happy with the more liberal licenses – or, perhaps more worryingly, do not understand the full implications of those licenses – the re-use of third-party material remains extremely difficult for us. Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) are often extremely poor at understanding the conditions under which we need to license material and insist that the licensed material remains under an all rights reserved status. The inclusion of this material is not optional. It would be the equivalent, in a citation, to saying: “As Eve et al. note: [see their article, p. 35, where they describe the processes of peer review]” or similar. The utility of the article is severely degraded. ..."