Researchers Opt To Limit Uses of Open-access Publications 172
ananyo writes "How open do researchers want open-access papers to be? Apparently, not that open — when given a choice of licenses, most opt to limit the use of data and words in their open-access publications, according to figures released by the open-access journal Scientific Reports. Since July 2012 the journal has been offering researchers a choice of three types of license. The first, most liberal license, CC-BY, allows anyone, even commercial organizations, to re-use it. A more restrictive version, CC-BY-NC-SA, lets others remix, tweak and build on work if they give credit to the original author, but only for non-commercial (NC) purposes, and only if they license what they produce under the same terms (SA, or 'share-alike'). A third licence, CC-BY-NC-ND, is the most restrictive, allowing others to download and share work, but not to change it in any way (ND, 'no derivative works'), or use it commercially. The results from Scientific Reports shows that, for the 685 papers accepted by the journal, authors chose either of the more restrictive licences 95% of the time — and the most restrictive, CC-BY-NC-ND, 68% of the time."
Re:blanket statement: evidence please (Score:5, Interesting)
Evidence please. Or we're just slinging personal anecdotes here. Which wouldn't get us published in a decent peer-reviewed journal ;-)
Well it is anecdotal, but I've been in literally hundreds of 'which journal should I send my paper to' discussions (I've been doing this a long time), and the factors that come up are (in this order) (1) impact factor (2) readership, ie which society is the journal affiliated with (3) likely success (4) cost of publication. Nobody has ever once said to me "I want to send to journal X because they are open access".
I think most would agree in principle that open access is a good thing, but when it comes to having your work seen, read and acknowledged by the right people it completely goes out the window. This is medical research btw, different fields may differ.
Re:blanket statement: evidence please (Score:5, Interesting)
and what field are you in? Sharing culture varies radically depending on discipline.
Medicine. I agree it's less open that many disciplines. Like I said, I think open access is generally a good thing. But in my vast experience, people actually doing research genuinely don't care, as they know that people at other universities will be able to read their work whether its open or not.
As an aside - a lot of universities are rejecting the 'Gold' open access standard (the author pays version) because it is horrendously expensive for authors (usually 1000-2000 per article). They are instead preferring the 'Green' open access model, where the journal keeps the copyright to the final copyedited version, but lets researchers distribute their own version on a personal or institutional website. This is probably the way of the future because we can't keep paying stupidly high open access publishing fees.