Biology Open journal uses not-quite-open CC-BY-NC-SA licence

“I have just sent this letter to the Editorial Office of the brand new open-access journal Biology Open, which has just published its very first issue....’First of all, congratulations on launching your new journal.  It is a very welcome addition to the field. Unfortunately, the utility of articles published in Biology Open under the current circumstances will be less than it should be.  As stated on your Open Access Policies and Fees page, “All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license”. Although in many respects this is an open licence, it does not conform to the the most widely accepted definition of Open Access, that of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)... for example, it is not in general possible to text-mine NC documents without complex negotiations.  It is for this reason that other open-access publishers such as PLoS and BioMed Central have elected to use a CC-BY licence.  A fuller discussion of the pros and cons of the NC clause can be found in this recent paper in ZooKeys. For these reasons and to facilitate the greatest possible value of the articles published in Biology Open, I urge you to consider changing the journal’s licence to CC-BY...”