Copyright and licensing

Copyright restrictions have become one of the key issues for research dissemination in recent years.  Traditional journal publishers generally continue to use copyright constraints to maintain subscriber-only access at high cost, despite electronic media cutting the cost of storage and dissemination to virtually zero.  At the other extreme, the new movement for open access pioneered by publishers such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) or BioMed Central (BMC) has tended to employ an extremely permissive license (CreativeCommons-Attribution) which grants legal freedom to redistribute and modify scientific articles in whatever way desired as long as the original authors are credited.

On the other hand scientific articles are just one of the areas of communication which need consideration from a copyright/licensing perspective.  Our work covers many other areas:

• Datasets are one of the primary 'currencies' of science: they are often hoarded and shared only under restrictive conditions.  We need to develop a more 'sharing' paradigm for scientific data.
• Liquid Journals are at their core collections of links - probably not copyrightable.  But these links will be surrounded by commentary, which needs a licensing structure.  Further, there are questions regarding what is linked to - is it accessible?  Can privileged agreements be formed between traditional publishers and select Liquid Journals where a link from such a journal grants access to full text for anyone who follows it?  How do we deal with questions of credit for Liquid Journals which do not generate original selections but aggregate the selections of others?
• Liquid Books follow in the footsteps of examples such as WikiBooks and software manual publishers such as O'Reilly who employ copyleft licensing for textbooks - that is, the license terms freely permit redistribution and/or modification (including commercial distribution) but require that derivative works grant the same freedoms.  However, this model may be inappropriate for some forms of scientific exchange.  Where an author is stating a personal opinion, or recounting an experience, to modify it is to misrepresent that author.  There needs to be a separation drawn between functional works such as textbooks or manuals and works of opinion or testimony, including accounts of scientific experiments.
• Liquid Conferences are 'virtual' discourses where invited authors present articles on various topics which are then subject to review, possible revision, and then extensive public commentary and feedback (which may again result in revision of the document).
• Reputation and identity are crucial factors in the present system which makes wide use of various automated metrics and quality measures.  While copyright may be inappropriate here, these are clearly factors that need some kind of institutional or other protection.
  

• The research process - with electronic media facilitating exchange, can we develop a more collaborative process of research itself, to replace the current 'in-house' method of research and publication with each research group doing its own thing?

Besides copyright, we also consider other forms of legal and/or social constraint including patents, trademarks, and community or institutional norms.

 General principles

• The licensing forms for different Liquid Publishing paradigms - liquid journals, books, conferences and others - should complement and facilitate each other.
• Licenses should encourage and facilitate independent innovation for 'purposes we can't yet envisage' (MacCallum, 2007).
• Licenses should not result in greater restriction of dissemination than exists at present.
• Community norms, rather than copyright restrictions, should probably be the principal source of constraints on use.  The main use of legal constraints should probably be for those cases where desirable activity clashes with accepted norms.
• Licensing, and rights, need to be accorded to factors other than scientific texts - to things such as identity, reputation and so on.
• The licensing paradigm needs to facilitate and protect the opportunity for multiple providers to offer Liquid Publishing services.  e.g. it should be possible (and should always remain possible) to transfer your Liquid Journal from one provider to another, without losing information in the process.

Documents

• Luc Schneider, Science and E-Commons. 7th European Conference on Philosophy and Computing - ecap09
• Gloria Origgi and Judith Simon. SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS 3.0.: The End of the Scientific Paper? The Beginning of What?
• Roberto Casati. On Publishing.  Interdisciplines
  

Work in progress

• Extension of State of the Art (SotA). A more extensive review of the literature and possibilities with respect to licensing, copyright, trademarks and patents and their possible application to different forms of scientific exchange.
• Licensing paradigms for Liquid Journals, Liquid Books and Liquid Conferences, prepared in line with the principles above.
• A model for free and open research collaboration along the lines of the free/open source software (FOSS) practices of sharing and development.
• If sufficient common ground can be found between different paradigms, a set of criteria for liquid licensing which can be used to certify providers of liquid services (this aims to avoid e.g. the current discrepancy in 'open access' between those publishers which adhere strongly to the Bethesda Statement and those who simply permit people to read articles without paying a fee; see McCallum, 2007).

Selection of relevant literature

• Benkler, Y., and Nissenbaum, H. Commons-based peer production and virtue. Journal of Political Philosophy 14, 4 (2006), 394–419.
• Dayton, A. I. Beyond open access: open discourse, the next great equalizer. Retrovirology 3 (2006), 55.
• Elkin-Koren, N. What contracts cannot do: the limits of private ordering in facilitating a creative commons. Fordham Law Review 74 (2005) 375–422.
• Elliott, R. Who owns scientific data? the impact of intellectual property rights on the scientific publication chain. Learned Publishing 18, 2 (2005), 91–94.
  
• MacCallum, C. J. When is open access not open access? PLoS Biology 5, 10 (2007), e285.
• Nature Web Debate. Future e-access to the primary literature.
  
• Noveck, B. S. Trademark law and the social construction of trust: creating the legal framework for online identity. Washington University Law Quarterly 83 (2005), 1733–1787.
• Reichman, J. H., and Uhlir, P. F. A contractually reconstructed research commons for scientific data in a highly protectionist intellectual property environment. Law and Contemporary Problems 66 (2003) 315–462.
• Schultz, M. F. Copynorms: copyright law and social norms. (2006).
  
• Stallman, R. M. Copyright and globalization in the age of computer networks. Talk given at MIT in the Communications Forum on 19 April 2001. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.html