Use of open licenses in open access publishing

Use of open licenses in open access publishing

/ Wed, 07/31/2024 - 12:58

Abstract

These guidelines provide support for IPSPs in the following areas:

  • Publishing content under an open licence (preferably CC-BY) to ensure further reuse without restrictions
  • Providing clear information to any user of the published content on the conditions of (re)use, in human and machine-readable form, on the article/chapter and publication level
  • Providing clear information on the IPSP’s policy towards authors' rights, copyright and licensing
  • Accurate reporting and regular updating of the information in relevant registries (such as DOAJ or Sherpa Romeo) by journal publishers


Main Text

The Open Science framework emphasises two important elements of Open Access (OA) publishing related to copyright and terms of use. The first is that authors (or their institutions) should retain rights to their scholarly outputs. The second is that all scholarly works should be made openly available directly at the time of publication and reusable under the terms of an open license so that content is truly open, and knowledge is available to be both used and reused (Labastida i Juan et al., 2023).

Regulating the use of published content

The use of all published works, unless otherwise specified, is fully defined by legal regulations on copyright in the respective country. Legal regulations on copyright are today largely harmonised around the world, and while copyright laws generally allow for the use of copyrighted works by the public for some purposes without asking for permission, these limitations to copyright do not grant to the public the right of full reuse of a work. Therefore the publication under the default regime of all rights reserved does not allow for the full reuse of a work so that all the benefits of open access can be realised.

If OA journals wish their content to be truly open for different kinds of use and reuse, by all users, and without the need to seek permissions, they can do so by granting such permissions in advance, clearly and publicly. Granting such liberal permissions in advance is best achieved by using standardised and machine-readable open licenses. In the world of scholarly publishing, various types of open licenses can be adopted, but the Creative Commons set of licenses are currently the most often used in both policy and practice, and have become the de facto standard for this purpose (Creative Commons, 2019). To the user, the licenses provide a clear answer to the question “What can I do with this work?” by granting rights under certain conditions. Rights and conditions are described by the following elements:

  • The work can be used freely so long as attribution is given to the author, the copyright holder and any party that it is stated to be acknowledged (BY - attribution)
  • The work can be used exclusively for non-commercial purposes (NC - non-commercial)
  • The work can be used freely but the creation and dissemination of derivative works is not allowed (ND - non-derivatives)
  • The work can be used freely but any derivative work must be licensed under the same license or an equivalent license (SA - share alike)


These conditions can be combined, and their combinations give rise to six different licenses: CC BY (the most liberal one), CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-ND and CC BY-NC-ND (the most restrictive one).

The definition of Open Access as set out in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI, 2002) and in the Berlin Declaration (MPG, 2003) is to grant full reuse of published academic outputs, subject to proper attribution of authorship. This definition entails that CC BY is the preferred license to be applied to scholarly works. For OA journals (and for the authors of their content), a CC BY license brings clear benefits and advantages. It enables full reuse and application without barriers in different contexts: research, innovation, education, culture, and business. It enhances the impact of published works, both academic and societal. At the same time, it provides legal protection for authors and rights holders, as the condition of attribution always applies. In the domain of journal publishing, attribution means that the original authors and original publication should always be cited and linked, ideally by using persistent identifiers. For book publishing, the question of selecting a license is a more complex one, see the section “Discipline- and format-specific considerations on licences” for a more detailed differentiation. 

Open licenses in practice

While CC BY is clearly the recommended license for OA journals, the ultimate choice of license for each journal should be a result of thoughtful consideration, and all stakeholders (editors, owners, publishers, authors and reviewers) should be made fully aware of the implications of the license chosen.

It is possible to decide that only one license will be used for all journal content (or even for all of the journals of one publisher), but in some cases, journals can opt for the adoption of several licenses and leave the decision on a license to the authors of each article.

Various factors can influence the journal's decision on a specific/recommended license:

  • Traditions and culture in a specific scientific discipline (e.g. some fields of humanities are reluctant to implement licenses that permit derivative works since they prefer to control the rights to translations, for example)
  • Research funder requirements (e.g. some European and international funders require CC BY for grantees)
  • Requirements of some databases (e.g. DOAJ requests that the journal uses any one of the CC licenses, while it must permit the use of a Creative Commons license that allows the creation of derivative products in order to obtain the DOAJ Seal)
     

A journal may impose different types of licenses for different versions of a manuscript (preprint/postprint/final version). However, this is not recommended for Diamond OA journals. OA journals should ideally leave it to the authors to decide under the terms of which license they will distribute the preprint or the author-accepted manuscript versions.

When a journal decides on the license that will be used, it needs to both make sure that the license is actually assigned to the published content and that the content is distributed under the terms of that license.

Depending on who the holder of the copyright is (or who has the exclusive right to publish the work), the assignation of licenses has 2 routes:

  • A - If the author has retained the rights (which is the recommended practice for OA journals), the author should choose or approve the license (via contract, statement or during the online application)
  • B - If the publisher is the holder of exclusive rights, they can determine the license independently.


For either route, a journal's decision at one point in time to use a certain license does not automatically mean that this license applies to all works of the journal prior to that decision. A journal that allows authors to retain their rights (situation A) would have to obtain permissions from authors (right holders) to apply licenses to older content, while a journal that is a holder of exclusive rights (situation B) could decide on its own to apply open licenses to backfile content.

Good practices highlighting licensing policies and the licenses themselves

It is very important that the terms of use expressed through the open licenses are communicated and stated very clearly, at different places, at different levels of granularity and in different ways.

  • License usage policies should be stated:
    • In the instructions to the authors 
    • On separate pages/sections dedicated to copyright and/or open access 
    • In publishing contracts or agreements, if they exist 
    • By registering policies in the Sherpa Romeo database 
    • By registering the journal policies in DOAJ 
    • On the journal pages of the publishing service’s platform of choice, or on a book publisher’s website 
  • The licenses themselves are displayed:
    • In the articles/chapters themselves, in all formats of the complete text (e.g. PDF and HTML), machine-readable (as a URL linking to the deed of the license, the human-readable version of the legal text) and human-readable
    • In the metadata description of the works 
    • They should be displayed through icons, hyperlinks to the deed of the license or the full legal text of the license and the short descriptive text in the article
       

Important tips:

  • All places where the journal copyright and licencing policies are described should express the harmonised views of the journal or publisher.
  • If journals are available on multiple platforms the information should be consistent across platforms.
  • License terms and copyright policy should be used with consent and not contradict each other. If a journal revises its copyright policy, care should be taken that it is still aligned with the licensing terms of individual articles.
  • Besides displaying the license, it is also necessary that the rights holder is stated clearly (In case of more restrictive licenses, those who want to request permission for commercial use or derivatives should be able to identify who they need to contact)
     

Discipline- and format-specific considerations on licenses

In some scholarly fields, the use of so-called “third-party copyright” (materials for which other persons or institutions are authors, owners and rights-holders) is more common than in others, such as, for instance, in art history. Where that is the case, journals should give detailed advice to authors on how to acquire permission to use such materials for them to be able to insert them into their own works and distribute them under the open license. When it is not possible, such third-party materials should be clearly labelled to communicate that they are not being distributed under the same license as the rest of the work. In some cases, it can even be required that such materials be omitted from the OA editions (Hudson & Aplin, 2023)

While it is generally agreed that CC BY is the best choice for scholarly journals, there isn’t yet such an agreement with regard to scholarly books that is particularly relevant to the disciplines where long-form texts are the dominant publishing model. There are different considerations on the preferred licenses for books (Collins et al., 2013; Adema et al., 2021), and some negative experiences with the most liberal licenses.
 

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This article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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