A philosopher in Australia writes:
I've just become aware of an issue that strikes me as worthy of discussion among professional philosophers. I'm not aware of any such discussion so I thought it might be something you may wish to broach on your blog?
The issue is about the particular licence that many (not all) journals and funding organisations seem to be specifying now for open access publication: CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>
This licence allows readers to share freely (of course) -- but also to "Adapt: remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially" as long as attribution is given ("You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.").
It's not the commercial use part that worries me here: it's the whole idea of adaptation/remix/transformation. This seems to me to be a very radical departure from academic norms. According to long established norms, we quote work by others, paraphrase it in the context of criticism (or endorsement), explain how it feeds into our own work and how we take ourselves to be extending it, etc. -- but we never take another's words (not in quotation marks), and add some words of our own, and then disseminate that (even with an acknowledgement of the author whose work we are adapting or remixing).
[The Open Logic Project <https://openlogicproject.org/> is a notable departure which proves the norm, so to speak: it is explicitly open source, and open for adaptation and remix, and it is published under the CC BY licence. It is also collaborative, not single-authored. But this was always part of the point and it was made clear from the outset that the project was an attempt to do things differently.]
Agreeing to adaptation and remixing of one's work is totally different from handing over access rights in traditional journal publication. I'm extremely surprised that in agreeing to publish open *access* with some major philosophy journals, one is also agreeing to this sort of reuse of one's work.
To give just two particular examples, the only Open Access option offered by Synthese is CC BY. Philosophers' Imprint uses the licence CC BY-NC-ND, which prohibits commercial use (NC) and does *not* allow adaptation/remixing/transformation (ND: no derivatives). The latter is what I'd have assumed "Open Access" means, based on my folk understanding. The former is something completely different (it seems to me) and something I feel quite uncomfortable about.
I wonder if you (and others) are aware of this issue (to be clear: not "open access" in some intuitive sense vs subscription, but Open Access as meaning specifically CC BY in many cases now, i.e. allowing remixing), and if so what you (and others) think about it?
I was not aware of this, and I think it's outrageous! Is this not as bad as it sounds? Thoughts from readers?
