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A Fool's Errand

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A Fool's Errand COMMENT by the madness of mobs. Will a crowd- sourced scholarship be dominated by pro- vocative pap that fills without nourishing? Here we must recall first that schol- arship has always been a community MONROE BRENDAN enterprise, driven by building consen- sus among experts10. So the question is not ‘Should we crowdsource?’ but ‘How should we crowdsource?’. Second, we must dispose of the straw-man argument that hundreds of uninformed readers’ opinions will count for more than one Fields medallist’s recommendation. Authority and expertise are central in the Web era as they were in the journal era. The difference is that whereas the paper- based system used subjective criteria to identify authoritative voices, the Web- based one assesses authority recursively from the entire community. We now have a unique opportunity as scholars to guide the evolution of our tools in directions that honour our val- ues and benefit our communities. Here’s what to do. First, try new things: publish new kinds of products, share them in new places and brag about them using new metrics. Intellectual playfulness is a core scholarly virtue. Second, take risks (another scholarly virtue): publishing more papers may be safe, but scholars who establish early leadership in Web- native production will be ahead of the curve as these genres become dominant. A fool’s errand Finally, resist the urge to cling to the trap- pings of scientific excellence rather than Objections to the Creative Commons attribution excellence itself. ‘Publication’ is just one mode of making public and one way of licence are straw men raised by parties who want open validating scholarly excellence. It is time access to be as closed as possible, warns John Wilbanks. to embrace the Web’s power to dissemi- nate and filter scholarship more broadly and meaningfully. Welcome to the next opyright licensing is a topic usually left print, search, or link to the full texts of these era of scholarly communication. ■ to law review articles, or obscure terms articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them of service on websites, or agreements as data to software, or use them for any other Jason Priem is an information scientist Cbetween publishers and libraries. But it is an lawful purpose without financial, legal, or at the University of North Carolina at essential element of the move towards open technical barriers other than those insepara- Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA, and access — the free, immediate online availabil- ble from gaining access to the internet itself. co-founder of ImpactStory. ity of scholarly articles coupled with the right The only constraint on reproduction and dis- e-mail: [email protected] to use them fully in the digital environment. tribution, and the only role for copyright in An article that is free to read is not neces- this domain, should be to give authors control 1. Priem, J., Costello, K. & Dzuba, T. figshare http://doi.org/kvx (2012). sarily open for all uses — often, it cannot be over the integrity of their work and the right 2. Cronin, B. J. Inform. Sci. 27, 1–7 (2001). reused for text mining or in derivative works, to be properly acknowledged and cited.” 3. Priem, J. & Hemminger, B. H. Front. Comput. for example. The permitted uses depend on Traditional publishing licences tend to Neurosci. 6, 19 (2012). 4. Smith, J. W. T. Learn. Publ. 12, 79–91 (1999). the copyright licence used by the author. place restrictions on at least one of these 5. Esposito, J. J. J. Electron. Publ. http://dx.doi. In my view, for an article to be considered uses, and it isn’t easy for a reader to figure out org/10.3998/3336451.0011.203 (2008). truely open access, it has to meet the widely what those are. If the reader is a computer, as 6. Piwowar, H. Nature 493, 159 (2013). 7. Wilhite, A. W. & Fong, E. A. Science 335, accepted definition in the Budapest Open is more and more prevalent, the restrictions 542–543 (2012). Access Initiative — a set of recommenda- are a spanner in the works. 8. Priem, J. & Hemminger, B. M. First Monday (5 tions laid out by leaders of the open-access The use of the Creative Commons July 2010). 9. Edelman, B. G. & Larkin, I. Harvard Business movement in 2001. That is, users must be attribution licence (CC-BY) fulfils the com- School NOM Unit Working Paper No. 09-096 able to “read, download, copy, distribute, munity definition of open access and avoids (2009). a future morass of articles with murky legal 10. Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific provenance and concomitant unclear reuse Revolutions (Univ. Chicago Press, 1962). THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING A Nature special issue. possibilities. CC-BY was launched in 2002, The author declares competing financial nature.com/scipublishing 2 years before I started a 7-year stint as head interests: see go.nature.com/szgqx9 for details. of science initiatives at Creative Commons in 440 | NATURE | VOL 495 | 28 MARCH 2013 © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved COMMENT Mountain View, California. one. An essential function of the limited set of the tangles caused by commercial restrictions. CC-BY has now come under attack from Creative Commons licences is to forestall the The attribution can carry a requested form the International Association of Scientific, hobbling impact that licence proliferation has of citation, including the URL to the origi- Technical & Medical Publishers, which is on the network effect of open culture. nal, peer-reviewed, free and branded copy of discussing the introduction of a licence that On my cynical days, I fear that this kind of the article. Then, anyone wishing to reprint would implement some — but not all — of the hobbling is at the heart of a strategy to create must also reproduce that citation or be in commonly accepted tenets of open access. At ‘open-access’ licences just for scholarly pub- violation of the copyright. It makes it hard to a conference run by the association in Janu- lishers. These licences would reserve the most imply endorsement or sell something when ary, this was referred to variously as a “new” creative reuses for those who simply serve as the object itself carries the provenance, and licence and even as “CC Plus”. the midwives for content, not for those who links, to the free version in a trusted journal. It is a bad idea. Here’s why. might go on to create works that can surprise, Similarly, publishers can communicate inform and delight. If we allow only a tiny set their desired attribution in a text-mining TRIED AND TRUE of predicted reuses, those are, by definition, context. Indeed, because a text miner is only CC-BY is a liberal licence that allows any kind the only reuses we will get — and they will extracting ‘facts’ from the text, those facts are of use under copyright as long as the author benefit only the existing power players in by law not covered by is credited in the manner in which he or she scholarly publishing. “When in copyright — and thus not specifies. It is more than a decade old, clear, doubt, use subject to the attribution well-tested and deeply established as an effec- SPECIOUS CONCERNS running requirement. Of course, tive open-access licence for both for-profit It is hard to precis all the specious concerns code that from a technical and and non-profit publishers (see ‘Licence to about why CC-BY will not work for schol- someone else scientific perspective, share’). It has been translated into more than arly publishing. In brief, those opposing has already readers will always want 50 languages and is legally enforceable around the licence often claim that it: would allow written.” to know the provenance the world. No other open-access licence can others such as drug companies to sell works of a fact, and it is good claim its power, standing and adoption. downstream; implies author endorsement practice to link back to the source. Indeed, the Critics have lately dubbed CC-BY ‘viral’, of shady overlay journals; would require idea of link-based provenance is built into the and bridled against the idea of research coun- all the elements of an article to be freely design of the Semantic Web. It is a technical cils mandating its use as a way to implement licensed (including photographs, music, problem, not a legal one. open access for the scholarly literature. ‘Viral’ modern art and, presumably, Hollywood It is also easy to include in an article under a can be read either in the cultural sense — an films); and would make attribution on text CC-BY licence items not subject to the licence article becoming wildly popular — or in the mining unwieldy. — images, musical notation and more. That legal sense. The former is desirable. The lat- CC-BY does indeed allow resale — of simply requires the rider “this article, unless ter is false: CC-BY does not force derivative something that is already on the Internet for otherwise noted, is available under CC-BY”, works to be relicensed under the same terms. free. Anyone who pays for an object under and a note placed by the elements that are not Nor is it an unprecedented act for a funder CC-BY is either making a donation, or is pay- available. Thus, a photograph under a Crea- to maximize its return on investment by spec- ing a tax for being inept at searching the Inter- tive Commons licence can be used as one of ifying that publications arising from its funds net. And a few key elements of CC-BY make Time magazine’s Photos of the Year, for exam- be published under a liberal copyright licence.
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