A learned society has offered the Wellcome Trust an open access, author pays option for researchers who seek publication in their journal. However, the licence they wish to attach to these articles is more restrictive than the Trust would normally require when paying an OA fee.
The purpose of this posting is to seek opinion from the research community on whether these restrictions will, in any way, limit a researchers ability to re-use this content.
Summary of relevant licence conditions
The relevant section of the licence is shown below, in italics
PMC or UKPMC mirror site users may access, download, copy, display and redistribute articles, as well as text and data mine content in articles for non-commercial purposes only, subject to the following conditions:
In the case of text-mining, User may incorporate individual words, concepts and quotes up to 100 words per matching sentence, whereas longer paragraphs of text and images cannot be used.
Users may not create derivative works (as defined in the U.S. Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §101 et seq.) based upon the documents.
The Wellcome Trust is seeking input from the research community to help determine:
A) Whether such a licence would impact on your ability to re-use and re-purpose this open access content.
B) If so, please give some examples of research activities that would be limited by this licence.
If you would like to respond to this issue, please use the comment function below or send an email to r dot kiley at wellcome dot ac dot uk.
PS: Presently, there are 5 comments on this blog post.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/02/2009 04:21:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
