Re: MPS and PLoS Sign Agreement

[Jan Velterop <velteropvonleyden@btinternet.com>]

Sandy,

It is not so much that an author retains 'value' than that it is 
a way to deal with the legal construct that copyright is. 
Copyright is granted automatically to an author. Only the 
copyright holder can license, or even assign to the public 
domain, a copyrighted work. Not attaching a CC or similar licence 
to a work always keeps it in legal limbo, as the user can never 
be sure if (the monopoly granted by) copyright will be asserted 
at any point. This may not matter much for blog postings or list 
contributions such as this, but it may matter a lot for formal 
scientific articles.

As for moral rights, they are secured in most European countries 
(i.e. the 'Roman Law' countries) as you say. However, they are 
not, as I understand it, in Common Law (mostly Anglo-Saxon and 
their ex- colonial) countries. Including the 'European' UK. As 
science and science publishing are global pursuits, we cannot 
just rely on European (Roman Law) copyright, I would have 
thought.

I may be wrong, but this is what I've always understood. (If I'm 
wrong, I hope that list members will correct me).

Jan Velterop


On 22 Aug 2008, at 23:35, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> Just curious, what exactly is the value of the copyright that the
> author retains under this CC license since users can do practically
> everything with it except remove the author's name? There is no
> residual commercial value here, is there? Under European copyright
> law, with its moral rights" provisions, "attribution" already is a
> moral right ensured by law, so there would be no need even for this
> kind of CC license, would there? One could simply grant to users
> free use of the article for any purpose with no need to protect
> attribution, since that right is inalienable in "moral rights"
> systems.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press
>
>> PLoS applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to
>> all published articles. Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership
>> of the copyright for their article, but allow anyone to download,
>> reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in PLoS
>> journals, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No
>> permission is required from the authors or the publishers. Thus,
>> the contents of the seven Open Access journals of PLoS are freely
>> accessible for the reader worldwide via internet.